


turn over a stone

by nephropsis



Series: local foreigners [3]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Adulting, Career Ending Injuries, ESL Blues, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Relationship Negotiation, references to alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-24 08:24:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 46,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9713207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nephropsis/pseuds/nephropsis
Summary: In which Alexei Mashkov does not have a midlife crisis, learns that healing means a lot of different things and asks for what he wants, mostly in English.





	1. October - November

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT NOTES: as with kick on, references to Kent's brother are in this too, as are several instances of alcohol use and discussions of a peripheral character's alcoholism. There is a career-ending but non-graphic injury and some discussions of homophobia. Let me know if I've missed anything!
> 
> Huge thanks to lanyon, donya, ravurian and csoru for intense handholding and encouragement, and for letting me vent at all of them in the process of this whole... thing. I love you guys. 
> 
> All inaccuracies/mistakes are my own. If there's medical shit in here I got wrong, hit me up. If I don't get on and post this I'll fudge my thesis proposal, so hello all, and happy February. Have a sequel.

OCTOBER

 

Alexei heads home from Boston on a promotion day with the last traces of flashbulb afterimage lingering at the back of his eyes. He probably shouldn't be driving. Still, it's a beautiful, crisp autumn evening, and he's enjoying himself, drumming his fingers to the beat on the radio and driving at a completely reasonable speed. 

He's merging onto the Providence exit and musing about what to have for dinner when Jack tries to call him. He lets it go to voicemail because he doesn’t want to deal with the hands-free business, but then it starts ringing again, and then a third time. He fumbles it to speaker and answers, forcing out “yes?” and trying to keep driving in a straight line. Luckily that’s not the most difficult thing in the world, because his heart is suddenly in his throat for no reason he can identify.

“Are you driving?” Jack says, without a hello. “Pull over.”

Alexei does, veering off the road with a crunch of gravel, thankful that he’s off the highway.

“I was watching the Aces game,” Jack says, quickly. “I think you’re about to get a call from the medical team, but I know if it was me, Bit-- Eric would want to hear from a.... a friend first. I’m not sure if it’s better, but please... call us if you need anything.” Jack hesitates as though he expects a response. Alexei always hates to disappoint, but he can’t unclench his jaw, images flashing across his mind. Worst case scenarios. His hands are numb on the steering wheel.

“Okay,” Alexei says, when the line stays stubbornly open, and hangs up.

As soon as the call drops his phone starts ringing again, the stupid Ke$ha ringtone he keeps because Kent always sings along to it without noticing suddenly the most obnoxious thing in the world. He answers, hand almost shaking too hard to hit the button.

“Alexei?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dr. Martin, one of the orthopaedists with the Aces. I’m calling to let you know that Kent is-- hang on--” There’s a noise, and then, with a flood of aching, visceral relief, he hears Kent in the background, yelling _give me the fucking phone!_ In a what sounds like uncharacteristic hysteria. “Mr. Mashkov,” Dr. Martin continues, “I think I had better--”

“Put him on,” Alexei croaks.

“Don’t watch it,” is the first thing Kent says. “If you kill McDaniels you’ll be in jail and I’m gonna need you not to be-- I’m gonna be home for a while, so I need you not to be in jail, okay?”

Kent sounds delirious, words rushing through chattering teeth, so Alexei just says “okay, I won’t,” hoping the tremor in his own voice is relief, not the hideous panic of waiting to hear what’s happened. “You put me back on with Dr. Martin now, please?” As Dr. Martin is talking, Alexei gets back on the road and turns around. He has plenty of clothes at Kent’s house and his passport in his bag, so all he does is call Georgia and tell her he’s got a family emergency.

“I saw,” she says, kindly. “I’ll square it.”

Alexei laments every logical impulse that made him stop watching Kent’s games on TV. It doesn’t matter how homesick they make him for Kent’s house, he should have seen it. He shouldn’t have had to hear from Jack over the phone.

The flight to Las Vegas is mostly empty, so Alexei can’t even strike up a conversation with a seatmate to pass the time, and the flight attendant is busy working. It would be rude to distract her. It’s a long five hours.

-

At first a broken leg sounds bad, but not career-ending. Tibia and fibula in the lower third, above the skate, they can plate that, no problem. But the third casualty is Kent’s left knee. It’s been stiff for years, Alexei knows, but none of them are walking around without an ache or five, so he always trusted Kent to know when it would be time to do something about it, like the summer Alexei got his left shoulder tightened and spent a month complaining about it.

All Alexei knows, flying across the continent and wishing he could somehow pinch the clouds together and hop end-to-end, is that Kent is thirty-three years old, Alexei is thirty-five, and for six of those collective years Alexei has been slowly realising that nothing in the world matters as much as being there, close enough to touch, when it really counts.

It hasn’t even been that long since he was in Las Vegas, sneaking away for Kent’s new year in September because it miraculously fell on a day with no games and nothing Alexei couldn’t clear off his calendar, but this feels different, urgent.

When he finally makes it to the hospital Kent is asleep, propped up on medical supports with his whole left leg in a big strap-on brace, waiting to be scheduled for the first surgery. He looks small and young with his eyes closed. It’s only when he’s awake that Alexei thinks he shows his age; it’s always been all in the eyes with Kent, who has the best poker face of anyone Alexei knows.

Kent wakes up when he shuts the door, sort of, but enough to give him jerky finger-guns. “Hey,” says Kent, drawing it out. “I’m super high right now.”

Alexei grabs his lifted hand and presses it to his chest, relieved against all logic and reason to see him, to feel him warm and alive. “I know. Go back to sleep,” he tells him, and Kent just squints at him and seems to agree, because he’s out like a flicked switch.

The hospital isn’t an unfamiliar one. It’s the same one he picked Kent up from when he had the bone spurs taken out of his hips, and the same one he visited him in the summer Alexei won the Stanley Cup and Kent had stayed in Las Vegas to fix his wrists.

That summer Alexei had stayed in America, in his little apartment in Providence, taking calls for so long that he almost threw his phone, his laptop and his tablet in the river. His Russian agent had urged him to come back to Moscow to make a denial, to talk about emotions running high and heat of the moment and friendly rivalry.

Instead, Alexei had warned his family by email because none of them would pick up the phone, agreed to an interview with ESPN and then told them he’d only do it from Las Vegas. He’d flown out the next day.

When he’d spoken to Kent about it, home from the hospital and propped up on the couch, both wrists splinted and gingerly balanced on his lap, Kent had said: “They’re not going to softball you,” with the kind of deep weariness Alexei had always associated with soldiers.

“Is okay,” Alexei had told him, meaning it. “I want to say it. And is not illegal to be like us in Russia yet. Just not good. They can’t hurt me here.”

Kent had given him that look again, the wary, grey-eyed one. It had seemed to Alexei to be some kind of barometer for Kent’s seriousness whenever Kent’s eyes caught the light that way, lit up like the old nickel roubles his grandfather used to pull from behind Alexei’s ear, telling him the metal came from right there beneath their feet. Kent’s eyes had looked blue again a moment later, when he slid sideways onto Alexei’s lap with a sigh, and let him coax his fingers into Kent’s coarse blonde hair. “I don’t want you to have to-- just call me after, okay?”

“Okay,” Alexei had said, peaceably. He had been too happy for bad moods to last long, then, too delirious with relief and release. Too delighted to be close to him, to be able to touch him and not have to resist himself.

The day after the ESPN broadcast Alexei had put his flat in Moscow on the market anonymously and started looking for a good immigration lawyer.

This time Kent isn’t going to walk slowly out of the recovery ward high on the painkillers he hates, propped against Alexei’s side and pawing at his face with a look of awe, muttering “wow, you’re so tall. I always forget you’re so tall.”

Alexei stays in Kent’s house at his garbled request. He looks earnestly up at Alexei and says “you have to-- the cat feeder. Feed her, she’s old,” before falling back asleep.

-

Kit barrels into his shins when he steps through the door and Alexei picks her up, wondering if she knows something’s wrong too. He’s comforted by her familiar weight, and the deep rumble of her purr against his chest seems to unlock something beneath his sternum, because then he’s breathing hard into her fur, amazed and grateful at her tolerance for the shaky sob he lets out before he puts her down.

He feeds her, as promised, and then, standing alone in Kent’s familiar, empty kitchen, he pulls up video on the phone and watches the hit. Kent does down into the boards like a puppet abruptly separated from his strings, McDaniels skidding to a harsh stop right after, aghast.

Alexei thinks he might be sick.

Instead he calls his alternate, then Georgia again. He takes the first healthy scratch of his career, and even management tells him to stay in Nevada. Alexei thinks they might have seen it too, but doesn’t want to ask.

Finally he calls Leo and gives him the details. Leo doesn't say anything about how long Alexei left it before calling him, but Alexei apologises anyway.

“It's okay,” Leo says, “just tell me what you want to do.”

“You have time machine?” Alexei mutters, too tired to stop himself.

“Believe me, I'd be the first to use it,” Leo tells him. He isn't laughing, but Alexei feels better anyway, in some small measure.

“I think you should come to here,” Alexei says, thinking of Kent blurry-eyed and cold-fingered. “If you can.”

“Of course I can.” For some reason, Alexei is painfully relieved. He tells Leo to send him his flight details and rings off, then starts cleaning Kent’s kitchen, trying to distract himself by cutting through the mess Kent always seems to accumulate somehow, despite having more than enough money to hire someone to help him.

Nobody has a long career in hockey if they’re afraid of getting injured. That’s just a fact. Everyone will readily admit that as soon as you start thinking about the possibility when you step onto the ice it’s time to call it quits. Alexei never thinks about it, but he and Kent have had careers blessed with the kind of luck that always runs out, if only because it’s always on a body clock. Alexei can’t sort his thoughts out in such a way that they don’t cycle back around to the hit, or the terrifying silence afterwards.

Kent’s always been on the smaller side. Until now he’s always been fast enough. Alexei drops the sponge in the sink and gives it up for a lost cause, knowing he’s just going to head back to the hospital, if only for the reminder that it could have been a lot worse.

-

They prep Kent for surgery in the morning. Alexei is grateful for the perks of the NHL often, but this morning particularly, as there had been a bed available for him without question. He’s become more familiar with Aces management over the years he and Kent have been together, so it’s not a surprise when Jim Merrow, still GM, calls him and tells him that anything he has trouble with should be sent up the chain and he’ll take care of it. Kent might not like him but he has been doing his best to make up for it. Alexei isn't naive enough to think it’s because he’s suddenly had a change of heart about him and Kent, but at least he’s making the right noises.

Alexei manages to wake up in time to see Kent before they start anaesthetic and kiss him once for luck. He tastes dry and hospital-sour and is clearly displeased at having not been able to shave. Alexei doesn’t care. He breathes in the smell of his hair, fixes in his mind the dry touch of Kent’s hand on the back of his neck, and then he pulls a smile out from where the happiness Kent engenders in him lives and leans in close to show him pictures of Kit sleeping with her tongue out to make him laugh before the scrub nurses come back.

Kent cracks a terrible joke about sponge baths with half a grin, and when the nurse laughs he looks at Alexei over her head. The look in his eyes says he’d rather Alexei didn’t stick around to see him get loopy as the first sedative for the general takes hold, so Alexei only watches them work for a few seconds before he can convince himself, fighting to remain in the place of logic and reason, that Kent is going to be fine.

Then he gets out of their way and gets to work.

The legalities of their arrangement have been an issue before, but thankfully never with either of their teams. Alexei doesn’t pretend to understand American politics any better than he understands Russia’s, but that doesn’t mean he’s ignorant to either. Home comes with a certain set of problems: the press control, the entrenched collective memory of a people mistrustful of anything too out of the ordinary to be ignored; the willingness people have to allow themselves to be lied to, but that’s not so different from America at all. It’s just that America has been better to him, because Alexei comes from somewhere else, and sometimes it’s easier to be a stranger.

That doesn’t make it less frustrating to watch laws roll back and forth like waves. Even the American passport he has in his inside pocket never quite feels like it’s his in the way he’s Russian, because he did it out of necessity. It’s easier to be a stranger than an exile.

He’s glad it’s this hospital, in this state, where they're known and where Kent’s unspoken reluctance to get married doesn’t mean Alexei will have to bulldoze his way into Kent’s room by explaining over and over again why he’s his medical proxy.

He’s even glad that he and Kent have been immortalised in all their exhausted, hollow-cheeked glory from the night they played their Stanley Cup final against each other, splashed onto magazine covers and posters and even signs calling them the heralds of the end of times. He’s glad people who don’t give half a goat’s carcass about hockey know who they are. It would be different for him, big and foreign and imposing despite himself, wandering the halls of a private hospital looking for a doctor to speak to about his boyfriend’s treatment, if they weren’t well known enough for what protection that offers.

At least he can do it here. He’s not much given to anger, or at least not anger that lasts the way Kent can be, but there are some things that will never stop hurting. It might not be illegal for him to exist in Russia but it feels like it is, and damned if he’s going to shrink quietly into a corner anyway. It would be easier if Alexei could just flash a ring and insist on seeing his husband’s doctor, but Alexei has had years to learn how stubborn Kent can be without ever saying a word.

He finds Dr. Martin’s number in his phone and just calls her. She isn't operating on Kent but she’s the only one Alexei knows by name, and he wants to know when he needs to be back at the hospital.  
“Oh, hello Alexei,” she says, sounding harried. “Didn’t Dr. DaCosta explain?”

Alexei hasn't even seen Dr. DaCosta, and says as much.

“Ah. Well, what has to happen first is—“

Alexei has an uncomfortably detailed knowledge of surgical procedures purely from having been around the gamut of hockey injuries: sliced achilles tendons and broken collarbones and ruined ACLs and smashed jaws, the ubiquitous missing teeth and the concussions. He listens and files it away, asking her to repeat herself when he isn’t sure exactly what she’s saying, brutally ignoring the gnawing discomfort in his gut that says injured-injured-injured like a self-defeating metronome. Finally, he asks her about recovery time.

“We won’t known until after, I’m afraid. He’ll need to stabilise, and then we can think about PT and make a plan. When are you going back to Providence?”

Alexei doesn’t know, but it will have to be soon. He has to play, and no amount of desire on his part to stay and hover and make sure Kent is fine will change that. He knows it, Kent knows it. They both signed up for a life of distance and decided to let the future come in its own time. It doesn’t make it easier. He thanks her and rings off, and then he’s left standing in the hall staring at his phone, trying to force himself to move.

Leo is arriving at five in the afternoon, and Alexei has a whole host of missed texts and calls and emails he should deal with. He pulls his lip between his teeth and starts heading back to Kent’s house. Even when he’s out of surgery he’ll be high as a kite, and Alexei knows Kent would rather come down in his own time, without the risk of his loosened tongue saying anything he’ll regret when he’s sober again.

Alexei remembers evenings on his couch in Providence after away games and summer weeks in Las Vegas where Kent lives year round and all the times they’ve managed to steal a few days away. None of it has been like this, the knowledge that Kent isn’t just a little banged up and that leaving will mean leaving him to recover alone. Kent doesn’t have a rookie this year, and even knowing that his team would die for him doesn’t mitigate the hard clench of Alexei’s throat when he thinks about going back to Providence.

He can’t help but rail at the unfairness of it, that Kent is the one whose body has the most visible road map of scars between them already, even though Alexei is the one whose job on the ice is to block, check, bruise. It’s just the game, and Alexei loves it, the speed and the adrenaline and the strategic joy of playing with people on his level, but he doesn’t love hockey the way Kent loves hockey. He doesn’t think anyone loves hockey the way Kent loves hockey. It can’t possibly be fair that Alexei has the first inklings that something isn’t right about this, that the fact that Dr. Martin isn’t trying to set out an optimistic prognosis for him means there might not be one.

If anyone is going to find a way back from this it will be Kent, who wakes him up at the crack of dawn when they go back to Utica for the winter break to go play one-on-one shinny on the pond behind his dad’s house, and whose team depends on him the way his own never has on him. They respect him, and he loves them, but to depend on him would imply that he’s integral to them, and at thirty-seven, he isn’t. Kent is the lynchpin of the Aces, and everyone knows it. It would be some kind of cosmic cruelty to take it from him before he’s ready to let it go.

Alexei hasn’t been thinking about his own retirement yet, even though it’ll be sooner rather than later. He’s already butting up against the age of his own body, waking up wondering if that knot at the base of his neck will ever unkink all the way, whether an extra few seconds in the cryotank at the training centre will make a difference. He’s already fractured both his collarbones, dislocated an elbow and lost three teeth to a high stick, but those are nothing injuries. Those alone wouldn’t stop him from playing. It’s normal.

It doesn’t stop him from cataloguing Kent’s opposing tally whenever he climbs sleepily into the shower with him, running his hands over the long scars Kent has on both hips from arthroscopy, or dragging a finger over the infinitesimally crooked line of Kent’s nose before he scrunches it up and pretends to go for Alexei with his crowded teeth. It’s always been hard not to wish some of his own size and resilience into Kent, who is built in perfect proportion, broad shoulders and heavy thighs and sharply defined muscle under pale, exuberantly freckled skin, but it’s the other things Alexei notices more now. He’s small enough to have delicate hands with long, bony fingers. He’s got smile lines beside his fine-drawn mouth, and his eyelashes are so pale they’re almost invisible unless they’re wet. Once, when Alexei was hammered on New Year, he told Kent that the height of his forehead reminded him of the saints painted on the ikons he remembers from childhood, and Kent had laughed and forced him to drink water until dawn. The truth of it is though, that for every single scar and line and freckle Alexei has always thought of Kent as having a kind of immortality that Alexei is fully aware is nonsensical. Talent and joy just has a way of lighting people up from the inside, and he doesn’t know what Kent will look like without it. he can’t imagine it. Trying to locks a band around his chest and squeezes all the air out of his lungs.

Alexei idles in the driveway for fifteen minutes with his head down on the steering wheel, thinking and thinking and thinking and getting nowhere. It’s like skating in circles, without the sharp cut of blades on ice to give it any edge of pleasure.

He finally forces himself to take a deep breath when his phone beeps him a reminder of Leo’s arrival, so he goes inside to make sure Kit is happy before he starts heading for the airport.

-

Alexei picks Leo up at the airport that evening, resolutely ignoring the few people taking surreptitious photos of him on their phones. He doesn’t usually mind but today he feels wrung out like an old rag, and would rather not have to deal with it. He doesn’t read his own press after having learned the hard way that scum rises to the top, and by now he knows himself pretty well: a slow-moving temper isn’t no temper at all.

Leo spots him right away and comes over with one of the small smiles he’s genetically bestowed on Kent: mouth pulled over to one side, lips closed. It’s mostly in the eyes. He crushes Alexei to his chest immediately, and then releases him almost as fast.

Alexei is still surprised at his affection. When he and Kent first got together, he hadn’t expected to be liked. Even if Leo knew Kent wasn’t ever going to settle down with a nice girl and have a bunch of kids, he had at best expected tolerance, but Leo is easy company, and has never treated Alexei as anything but Kent’s chosen member of the family. Sometimes it makes him wonder, if it can be so easy, why it seems so hard for his own blood to do the same, but that’s always a thought quickly banished lest it fester.

“Good flight?” Alexei asks, voice rough.

“Yeah.” Leo hands him his bag without protest. “How bad is it?”

“Pretty bad.” Alexei can’t sugarcoat to for him. If Alexei could stay and make sure Kent gets back on his feet that would be a different story, but Leo has a suitcase big enough that it seems he intends to stay for a while. “He’s out for whole season. At least.”

Leo says nothing, appearing to mull it over. “Well, it’s about time I took some of my vacation days,” he answers, glancing sidelong at Alexei to make sure he’s in on the joke too. Leo’s job hasn’t been regular in years but he keeps going part time, mostly, Kent insists, because he’d be bored otherwise. Alexei thinks that being a substitute teacher sounds better than working in the paper mill, but he grew up terrified of ending up down a mine, so he’s probably biased. Leo considers him for a second before he turns serious. “And how are you holding up?”

Alexei wasn’t expecting to have to answer that, but he finds himself confessing anyway. Somehow Leo has a way of drawing it out of him. “I’m wanting to kill McDaniels.” He manages to clamp down on the rest though: how awfully helpless he feels, how wants to push everyone else out of the way and somehow stick Kent back together, and how he’s so worried he can taste it, high and acidic in the back of his throat. “Kent tells me not to watch it, but I didn’t listen. Should know he’s always right.”

Leo shrugs. “Better not add murder to your rap sheet, son.”

He says it lightly, and looks so much like Kent for an instant that Alexei has to force his eyes back to the road.

“How long can you stay?” Leo asks, when Alexei falls silent.

“I think maybe latest is Thursday.” It’s only three days from now. He doesn’t even know when Kent will be home from the hospital. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Leo says, scrubbing a hand over his face, looking thoughtfully out the window. “He’s not going to be happy to be off his feet.”

“No, never.”

“Hasn’t changed.” The gravel in Kent’s driveway crunches under the wheels of his car. Leo doesn’t get out right away, scanning Alexei’s face with his sharp grey eyes. “You look like you could use a good night’s sleep, Alex.”

Alexei silently agrees; no matter how convenient a hospital bed was, most things just aren’t built for people his size. That’s not what’s been keeping him awake, though, and he thinks Leo knows as well as he does. “Will sleep better when he’s home.”

“Long as you don’t kill yourself worrying,” Leo says quickly, getting out of the car.

Alexei has managed to clean most of the detritus Kent accumulates when he’s not paying attention — books stacked back on the bookshelf instead of strewn around the living room, the pile of shoes by the door back into the closet that actually has racks for them, sweaters and hoodies crunched into the corners of the couch as makeshift pillows as though he doesn’t have perfectly good actual pillows — but it still isn’t quite neat the way Alexei keeps it when he’s home. Leo chuckles as he enters, re-folding a couch blanket Alexei has just tossed out of the way. “Anyone’d think I never made him clean his room.”

“I’m share with my brother and sister,” Alexei says, moving a book that has somehow ended up under the curtains. “Have to be neat or my things become their things quickly.”

“Adam was the neat one,” Leo says. “Sometimes I think Kent did it just to annoy him.”

“It’s never annoying me,” Alexei confesses, finding a single sock under the coffee table. “Is just Kent.”

Leo tenses up for a second, looking up the stairs. “He’s always liked this house,” Leo says. “I wasn’t sure he’d like it here.”

“I’m thinking maybe we live here after I retire,” Alexei tells him, voicing it so he doesn’t have to say the rest. “Get more cats, keep some rookies. Make Kent let cleaning service move his stuff.”

“Just don’t let him come back to New York,” Leo says, before he disappears into the kitchen. Alexei goes to join him, finding Leo peering into the fridge and shaking his head. “Hard to believe he doesn’t have any junk food.”

“We do,” Alexei says, reaching into the highest cabinet above the stove and pulling down a bag of the disgusting barbecue chips he loves, the kind that turn his fingers orange. “Beer?”

Leo agrees. They pass the bag back and forth across the kitchen island, speaking quietly while Kit watches from the sideboard, yellow and green lamplight eyes scrutinising them for falling crumbs and clearly finding them wanting in Kent’s absence. Over the years her thick, double-layered fur has smoothed down to a burnished pewter shine, and her permanent snarl has taken on a kind of smirk-like quality Alexei will never admit reminds him powerfully of Kent. She licks herself fastidiously when Alexei offers her a chip, wrinkling her mottled pink nose.

“You going to set up for him in Providence?” Leo asks, after they’ve slowly gotten through a beer each and two packs of chips.

“Is all one floor,” Alexei says, thinking aloud. “Maybe he’s not coming for a while but—”

Alexei has already thought about it, what it means that Kent will be off his feet for months, that Alexei will be on planes at every opportunity to come see him if he decides he wants to stay in Nevada, the logistics of PT consistency. What he hasn’t thought about is what will happen if Kent just doesn’t want to come stay with him while he finishes out the season. For years he’s thought of Kent’s house, this house, as their home and has always assumed that in the nebulous future they would both be here, ageing and happy, but he hasn’t thought about what it will mean to actually have Kent in Providence.

His apartment is huge now; the first Thanksgiving Leo and Kent came to stay at the old place, Alexei had completely forgotten that the bed in the only furnished guest room had a broken stand, propped up on old books and cardboard from when a rookie who needed a place to crash had bounced on it too hard. Kent had insisted he and Alexei sleep in it and give Alexei’s enormous king to Leo. They had nearly laughed themselves into an endorphin rush trying to fuck on it quietly, bed frame creaking precariously on its makeshift stand while Kent clasped a hand over Alexei’s mouth and giggled into the back of his neck.

After that he’d finally moved, feeling less obligated by the day not to spend too much of his money in case he’d need it one day for some nebulous emergency. He’s never quite understood the excess of his friends, but then again they have families and children and an ease of travel Alexei will never, ever get back. Alexei thinks on some level he must have always known that his secret wouldn’t stay that way forever and planned accordingly.

His top floor penthouse has a walk-in closet that’s just full of spare gear and he has more bathrooms than bedrooms. It’s got a mezzanine and floor to ceiling windows and he keeps on living in the city centre because he can’t face the idea of rattling around an empty house in the suburbs and comparing it to here, which has felt like a home since the first time he set foot in it, however strange that sounds. It’s got plenty of room for anyone who wants a place to sleep.

His apartment still not quite home, but Alexei thinks it’ll work. “I hope it is being okay for a while. When season is finished I’m come back here.” He doesn’t mention that it’s still only October, and the season might not end until June. If they’re lucky it’ll be June.

“You’ll let me know if you need anything,” Leo says, recycling his bottle from his stool with the perfect aim he’s also passed on his son. “We both know Kent won’t.”

“Is like he thinks— thinks we’re say no, if he asks.”

Leo scrubs a hand through his hair, pushing the grey mass of it back off his face before it falls right back. “Yeah. Dunno where he gets that from.” He smiles again, and finishes the last of the chip dust. “Good thing he’s got you.”

Alexei will never admit how hard it is to hear that, said so baldly, with such trust and assurance. It can’t be possible but it happens anyway, with slow wry regularity, and Alexei sometimes thinks that he used up all his luck the night he made the choice to be with Kent despite every reason not to, because it’s returned to him manifold, in a million small ways.

-

Alexei spends the night with Kit at the house and Leo spends the night at the hospital. They text back and forth and Alexei comes in at dinner time to bring them both surreptitious Thai from the place off the strip Kent swears by when they’re a little drunk at three am. They eat around Kent’s enormous brace, stupid rolling hospital table too small for three men even if one of them is five-ten on a good day. Kent pushes noodles around with his fork, freckles standing out stark on the bridge of his nose and splashed over his cheekbones.

“They said it went well,” Leo says, when Alexei arrives loaded down with cartons. “Clean breaks above the skate, right?”

“Yeah,” Kent chimes in, grimacing. “Only six screws. Airport security’s gonna love me.”

“What they are saying about your knee?” Alexei asks, because he’s tired and worried and not thinking about tact or delicacy or anything beyond just wanting to know.

Kent grabs a handful of the stiff hospital sheets, knuckles white against the duck-egg blue. “They’re gonna replace it,” he says, casually, before stuffing a forkful of Pad Thai into his mouth.

And that’s it. Kent is never playing in the NHL again.

Alexei wants to touch him so badly that he stops himself, because if he does, if he reaches across the scratchy cotton separating them and lays a hand over his clenched fist and Kent shrugs him off, Alexei thinks he might burst into tears.

Leo pats Kent awkwardly on the thigh, the one that’s not encased in a prison framework of black plastic and steel, and none of them can say a word. Alexei has plenty, but none of them are in English, and he doesn’t think a prayer would be welcome when it won’t do a damn thing.

-

Alexei learns a lot of things that night: Kent asked the doctors not to say anything about the knee replacement because he wanted to break the news himself. Kent still hasn’t broken the habit of punishing himself for things that are not his fault. Kent is terrible on crutches and it puts him in a terrible mood.

“I’m a professional fucking athlete,” he snarls, when Alexei offers him a hand in Leo’s coffee-seeking absence. “I can do it.”

Kent is not supposed to be on his feet without a nurse in the room but neither Leo nor Alexei are going to try and impose that on him.

Alexei should. He should take the snapping and the glare and the stiff-backed resistance of a furious cat and just ride over it, because Kent is awful at taking care of himself unless he does it by accident, but there are only so many nerves in Alexei’s body. He can’t help but feel scraped raw when Kent hurts this badly, because he learned a long time ago that being with him means being in him, in a way; Kent goes all-in, and it would be the height of masochism to resist it, that fierce gravity well of connection he's never felt with anybody else. The problem is that Alexei can feel the furious grief rolling off Kent in relentless waves and cannot bring himself to add to it. If he wants to feel the floor under his feet Alexei won’t stop him. It makes him a bad nurse, but when Kent climbs back into bed with slightly more grace he grabs Alexei’s hand and doesn’t let go. “They— I’ve got painkillers. For a long time.”

Alexei squeezes back, hearing what isn’t being said, another trick he's learned from long experience. “Maybe we find one that isn’t so strong, yes? We’re try different ones.”

“It’s like I’m not even here,” Kent mutters, glancing at the door before fixing Alexei with a wide, cracked-open look. “I can’t even tell what hurts.”

Alexei would climb into bed with him if it would help, but all he can do is crunch up as close as possible and sling an arm across his shoulders, letting Kent pillow his head in the curve of his neck. “You here for sure,” Alexei says into his cheek. “Heavy. Smell pretty good for someone who isn’t showered. Need to shave, getting prickly.”

Kent laughs quietly, relaxing into the side of his chest. “Yeah, okay. If you say so.” And then: “Fuck, I’m so glad you’re here.”

If Alexei could nix his contract right then and there he would, but that’s not how it works. “I’m coming back to get you. You come to Providence for a while, let me spoil you. Let Kit scratching all my sofas. Yes?”

“Yes,” Kent echoes, a bit of warmth in his voice. “She’s going to pee on everything, you know.”

“Is okay,” Alexei answers. “Febreze amazing for hockey bag, will probably work on cats too.”

Kent falls asleep before Leo comes back, and Alexei can’t bring himself to move, even when Leo offers him a milky coffee in a small styrofoam cup. He takes it very carefully, right arm numb from the weight of Kent’s torso. It’s the best he’s felt in days.

“I’m going to get some clothes,” Leo whispers. “See you in an hour?”

“Okay,” Alexei says, glad he doesn’t have to move yet. “Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

-

Alexei heads back to Providence on the now-familiar early flight to Boston, because he’s gotten three firm emails from Georgia asking him if he wants to scratch for the next game and giving him a very polite deadline by which to reply. _I know you are having a family emergency_ she writes, with the care he knows she really, actually means, _but could you please let me know by tonight whether we’re scratching you from the Schooners late game? I will support your decision but we need to make a plan for alternate players. We can discuss personal leave if you need it._

He wants to thank her for not trying to draw him back quicker, but he doesn’t think he can take leave only a quarter of the way through the regular season, not when every single sports outlet is probably already speculating as to whether Alexei is going to choke hard and fall to pieces. The part of him that could never let a dirty hit go rails against it, a pulse of disgust low in his gut. He tells her he’s planning on playing, even though he can’t quite imagine it, sliding back onto the ice knowing it’s something that just belongs to him now, no matter that nobody knows yet. Alexei knows.

He hasn’t replied to even half of his correspondence, so he churns through it on the plane, methodically, the way Kent’s terrifying agent Henrietta —now his, too— taught him to at a dinner party of hers they went to years ago. He unearths condolences and thinly-veiled requests for gossip and a dinner invite from Eric for whenever he’s back.

Alexei’s day passes in a daze; he makes it to afternoon practice by the skin of his teeth, but he’s there.

Even the rink seems to smell different, but he pushes it away. Poots claps a hand on his shoulder and whispers an absolutely filthy curse in his ear, which does make him laugh, but all too soon it seems like they’re lining up to go out on to the ice for the game, and as usual he’s heading out first after the goalie. First to have the lights hit his eyes, first to catch the gleam of smooth ice before it’s had a the determined assault of a game on it, first to put a blade to the surface. All at once his body lights up, adrenaline flooding in to buoy him. If he were less tired he might thank himself for doing everything he possibly could to be ready for this always; as it is he takes it as a gift and smiles, rubber of his mouthgurad hard and familiar between his teeth.

The game passes in a haze, but Alexei knows three things: one, shootout wins are still wins. Two, he’s fast enough to know when he’s skating slow and three, he knows when people are being gentle with him.

He answers a quick text from Dvorovenko on the Schooners’ defense before press and ends up agreeing to a drink, still as wrong-footed off the ice as he had been this morning, touching down at Logan in desperate need of a good coffee.

 _We all saw what happened to Parse_ Nikita says. _Want to get drunk?_

It’s such a particular, typical invitation that Alexei laughs out loud.

_Yes. None of that baby shit you kids drink. Real booze._

_Okay, Granddad._

The press ask him about nothing but Kent, as he’s been expecting. He’s surprised at how hard it is to say nothing, and he marvels again at how easy Kent has always made it look. Alexei fights every time not to get carried away on the high of a win or the pain of a loss and say something he’ll regret, but this time he’s just itching all over at the reminders everywhere of vanished health. Jack’s bare, unscarred kneecaps, Alvarez’s straight nose, Kellerman’s unbent fingers. Alexei’s own bare, even feet, long toes curing into the floor where he presses them down.

It hurts that nobody else is hurting.

Alexei skips out quickly, figuring if he brings a nice bottle of wine for Eric tomorrow he’ll be forgiven for avoiding the Captain Talk he’s sure is coming.

Dvorovenko is already at The Tollhouse when Alexei arrives, and he pushes the promised shot across the old, scarred bar with a little grimace.

“I could kiss you,” Alexei says, downing it. It burns his throat the way all good vodka does, like inhaling too-cold air. The Tollhouse is full of its usual crowd of raging hipsters and guys in suits and the booze is still as good as ever.

Despite being Ukrainian Alexei considers Dvorovenko an honorary countryman. Russian is his first language too, thanks to a Russian mother he talks about more than is probably healthy. (Alexei finds her terrifying, but that’s the case with many Russian mothers and should not be held as a point against her.) It’s good to see him; he was a Falcs rookie once, and as such Alexei privately considers him a wayward duckling all grown up, though he does unfortunately play for Seattle now.

“If you kiss me your husband will find a way to have me killed,” Nikita says in his thick Kiev accent.

“We’re not married,” Alexei sighs, for what feels like the thousandth time. “Get me another drink and let’s find a table.”

“Give it up, man. Isn’t the whole point of America that you’re supposed to put a ring on it? You’re basically married.” He pauses, gathering drinks as Alexei finds them a table. “He’s out for count?” Nikita asks, when they’ve achieved their objective and retired to a corner where the music is just loud enough to stop any opportunistic eavesdroppers.

“Yes,” Alexei says. He doesn’t elaborate. Nikita opens his mouth like he wants to pry, but then he closes it, wide brown eyes uncharacteristically wary under his close-shaved fuzz and thick, black eyebrows. Instead, he pours Alexei another shot from the bottle they’ve claimed to share.

“When my wife had the baby she couldn’t walk for like a week,” Nikita says, “I thought she was going to die, she passed this— fuck, I don’t know, weird shit, man. Medical shit. I had no idea childbirth was so fucking hardcore.”

Alexei drinks again, delighted that the vodka seems to be taking effect and thrilled with himself for taking a cab here. He thinks it displays excellent foresight and personal responsibility. “Please don’t talk to me about childbirth. There aren’t that many perks to homosexuality, leave me one.”

“No man, my point is, I was really worried! I thought something was seriously wrong, and she kept calling me a pussy and yelling about spine needles, it was bad.” He pauses to drink, looking very seriously at Alexei over the glass as he slams it back down. “We got Olga in the bargain, but you just get shit, right? It’s not like you can—”

“I wish I was still in Vegas,” Alexei mutters, holding out his glass. “He’s going to need help, and I— I don’t know what to do about it. About any of it. It’s never felt like I live so far away before.”

Nikita spills vodka on his fingers when he refills Alexei, but Alexei doesn’t mind. Most of it goes in the glass. There’s a long silence while Nikita tosses back his own drink, grimacing around the burn. “Well, you aren’t,” he says, “but you’ll figure it out. Drink up.”

Alexei can do that. It briefly settles him, but the worry is ever-present, every word he’s read about complications and outcomes churning around just out of reach where the alcohol has chased them. “What did you do? With Nina?”

“Fuck all, she just lectured me until she got better and now she’s talking about doing it again. She’s amazing.” Nikita shrugs philosophically, beginning to look a little soft around the edges. “I know you must be out of your mind, though. The first time I went on a roadie away from the baby I thought I was going to shit myself. Listen, we’ll check on him, okay? We’ve got your back. Call anytime.”

“Cheers,” Alexei mutters, draining the shot. “He’s— this is it, Nika. He’s not coming back.” Nikita silently refills Alexei’s shot glass. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? I shouldn’t have talked about it, but— fuck.”

“Lyosha,” Nikita says, as quietly as a man his size can really manage, “anyone looking at that could tell right away. McDaniels got suspended. It’s only a secret because nobody wants to say it out loud.”

“It’s like he’s been asleep since it happened,” Alexei mutters, blinking away the burn in his eyes. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Nikita says, grabbing his glass to finish out the bottle. “Come on, keep up. You’re not a sad drunk or I wouldn’t drink with you. Earn a good hangover then cry in the shower. Works for me.”

“Inspiring,” Alexei snaps, but then Nikita starts showing him photos of a baby nestled in with all his many dogs and Alexei finds himself laughing at the story he tells about finding something he thought was chocolate and casually licking it off his thumb, and then Dvorovenko is pouring him into a car and kissing him goodbye, a quick press of vodka-wet lips to his cheek.

His cab takes him home pleasantly hammered, but when he sticks his phone on to charge there are no messages from Kent and only one from Leo, a picture of Kent sleeping in the hospital, looking grey under the lights. _Out for the night_ it says. _He’s sleeping better._

It’s not too late to call the West Coast, but Alexei doesn’t think Leo would appreciate him drunk dialling to fumble around for English when he’s spent all night speaking Russian, and the last thing he wants to admit is what a relief it’s been to just be able to listen and talk and not work twice as hard to understand.

He still dreams about the hit, but this time Kent rolls back to his feet and spits his mouthguard out, and all his teeth with it, an endless stream of clinking white porcelain, and Alexei is behind a pane of glass and can’t pick them up.

-

When Alexei was young, there were three things to do in Norilsk: drive around and hope you didn’t run into anyone looking for a fight, do school stuff, or play sports. They never had money for anything extravagant, and Alexei never could concentrate in school, but he took to hockey the way icicles fall off roofs: directly, abruptly and with surprising force.

It became obvious by fifteen that he’d be entering the Kontinental earlier than most, so Alexei gave up on most other things, including being home much, which culminated in being signed to Norilsk Zapolyarnik with a sensation of relief as well as pride.

He remembers his years living in Sanya’s two-bedroom apartment as good ones, learning the league and the game and the men in it —as opposed to the boys— as good ones. Alexei thinks he laughed a lot as a teenager, or at least he remembers laughter; it was the first time he’d travelled, the first time he’d had the kind of team he’d dreamed of as a kid, the kind who’d watch his back if he needed it and who'd get him drunk if he asked. He remembers Sanya walking in on him jerking off and telling him his technique sucked instead of yelling at him to stop, and that had been when he’d realised he really wasn’t at home anymore, and he really wasn’t ever going to have to sneak around for a quiet corner away from his parents and siblings again. It was the first time he ever kissed a boy and realised why it was that girls never quite filled the space under his skin with sparks the way boys did sometimes, when he was just letting his thoughts drift. It was the first time he realised what it meant that he felt a magnetic drag under his navel at long, bare backs and flat chests like iron filings were buried in the meat of him, desperate for a magnet.

It was the first time he’d ever had his own money, even if then he was sending all of it home, just because he knew his mother never quite got what she needed even from two paychecks. He remembers those three years with a smile, which stirs in him a kind of nostalgia for his younger self, who was so easily pleased by his own hand, who had such easy standards for his satisfaction.

Now when he sends money he does it with a kind of bittersweet love, knowing it’s easy enough to look back from an ocean and a continent away and see that it wasn’t so bad at home. But even now, when the money isn't rejected out of hand, he wonders how much of it is going to end up down a bottle instead of in the college funds he’d intended to set up for his nieces, or for his mother’s retirement.

He gave up any say in its destination when he chose Kent wholly, utterly and vocally, and he’d make the same choice a thousand times. He has a good life here. Even staying in Providence has been good, in so many ways; he’d briefly considered waiving his NTC when he and Kent had gotten together, but there had been an expansion draft that year to revive the Nordiques, and Kent had only half jokingly told him that if he ended up in Quebec they might as well quit while they were ahead, and after that it had been no decision at all.

Providence couldn’t be more different from Norilsk: the river is nearly clean, and the sea isn’t far if he wants to see it. The sun stays up all winter, and people talk in the street. There are whole neighbourhoods dominated by students from Brown and a bookstore with a Russian section and a book club that Alexei is always somehow out of town for but reads along with anyway. He’s been planning to move to Las Vegas for years, but his retirement has always been a plan, not an immediate reality, even though he’s been thinking about it for a while. More than a while, but the Falconers have been good to him, even when Anaheim was freeing up space and when Kent’s contract got renewed indefinitely.

He had almost refused the A after Marty’s retirement, too disappointed in a playoff run that had ended in a straight defeat at the conference finals. Only Kent getting knocked out earlier and flying down for Marty’s retirement party had swayed him. It had felt so good to just wake up next to him after feeling so bad they couldn’t pull a win out for Marty’s last season that he’d nearly gone to free agency there and then, but as usual, Kent had known him better.

“Take it,” he’d said, half into his neck, sleep-mussed and summer warm. “We’ve got the rest of our lives to not play hockey.”

Alexei has a good life here, but even now, years later, it’s as though the colours get a little brighter when Kent is in town, when their bodies are near each other instead of just their voices, or what little imagination offers them across the portal of a video call. Alexei sometimes remembers Kent’s words when he’s just rung off Skype still shivering through the aftershocks of pleasure. They do have the rest of their lives not to play hockey, but in choosing hockey what Alexei misses is the smell of Kent’s freshly-washed hair, the warm weight of him pressed into his chest, and the way he sings in the shower like he thinks nobody is listening, smooth baritone strangely at odds with him, as though it comes from a slightly different era. He misses the way Kent snorts when he really laughs and the way he never takes his hair out of the drain, and Alexei’s standards are too high now to go back.

When he was young, there were always people around, people pressed close to him and people he’d rather have kept at arm’s length and people he shared better things than blood with, and even in America he’s gotten so much of that back, but the closeness he wants isn’t one he can recreate. Alexei misses being naive sometimes, because it would have been easy for a different version of him to quit everything and go all-in on Kent’s recovery, but he knows better now. He thinks maybe it’s more complicated than that.

He’d have liked to talk to his mother about it. It doesn’t make any sense, when she hasn’t mothered him for decades and has refused her claim on him completely, but the pull is there still, vestigial, to call and listen to her voice and ask how to take care of someone when you know they’ll hate every minute of it. How to make sure that love is enough. She wouldn't have answers, but still. He would have liked to ask.

-

Jack’s husband Eric does something complicated in PR that Alexei doesn’t really understand, but he very crucially does not work for the Falconers and therefore has other things to talk about. He’s also got a hobby Alexei is the regular beneficiary of, namely cooking elaborate meals to destress and then lying about it. Alexei appreciates both sentiments, especially “oh just come over, I always make too much, even if Jack will eat the leftovers in the middle of the night.”

Alexei is also the product of a culture where white lies are an integral part of the social fabric and so when Eric says “I always make too much” Alexei does not point out that he only does that when he knows someone is coming over, because he’s perfection incarnate when there are kitchen utensils near him. In return Alexei always brings him the good red wine he likes to get weeknight tipsy on.

Alexei didn't have to come out alone like Kent did; Jack stepped up with him after the Cup Final for the press conference and did it with him. No matter what bad blood exists between Jack and Kent, Alexei will always be grateful to him for that. The fact that Alexei might like Eric a little more than him is a later addition, something that’s grown out of many nights of comparing accents and laughing about movies and all the things Jack lets Eric take the weight of. Jack is Alexei’s captain on the ice, sure, but he thinks all three of them know which of them Alexei comes over to talk to.

Alexei thinks that they might be friends, him and Eric; of all the people he knows, Eric is the one whose family still doesn’t quite take it the right way when Eric wants to bring Jack with him on holidays and who look awkward in their wedding photos. He thinks maybe Eric gets it the way Jack doesn’t, that never-quite-right feeling when he sees their pictures.

Alexei thinks they might be friends, which is why it’s not entirely a surprise when Eric answers the door in what is clearly Jack’s apron from the size of it, looks Alexei up and down and says “well don’t _you_ look like roadkill on an August afternoon,” with a little twist to his mouth.

“Lots of flying,” Alexei explains, opening the wine instead of offering Eric the bottle. He hands him a glass instead and sits down in his usual spot at their enormous kitchen table, scarred from years of hot dishes and late dinner parties.

“How is he?” Eric asks, because he is unfailingly polite. Alexei knows he and Kent probably will never be quite comfortable with each other, because while Alexei might not have the stamina for a grudge, Eric and Kent might have to fight it out for the championship one day, but he thinks there’s truce there, at least.

“Not good. When he’s okay for flying, I hope he’s coming to Providence.” Alexei watches as Eric bends over to do something in the oven, a waft of something amazing floating across Eric’s perfect craftsman kitchen. “He’s not awake much. Painkillers. Leo is with him.”

Eric, apparently satisfied with the state of whatever he’s making, drags a chair out with his foot and drops into it with the kind of grace Alexei can only aspire to, his compact body long in the limbs and still somehow balletic. Alexei can’t imagine him ever playing hockey, despite every single video he’s seen of Eric out-skating Jack on speed. He’d never say it aloud but Eric reminds him of a Kent a little, in small ways. He wonders if Eric has ever noticed that Jack has a type.

“I just can’t imagine how hard it must be to be so far away,” Eric says. “Jack and I have been in each others’ pockets for years. Since college, and it’s still— wow, it still gets me when y’all are gone on road trips so much.”

Alexei puts his glass down. He might not be an angry drunk, but he can’t let himself do it again just yet, not even when it would be easy to get quietly fuzzed out with good company. “We are having the rest of our lives to not play hockey,” Alexei says, trying for a smile.

“Oh, honey,” Eric says quickly, “you know I didn’t mean it like that. I know it’s not something either of you did on purpose, I— here.” He gets up quickly, scooping something off a pot on the stove and holding out a spoon. “Try this, tell me what you think.”

Alexei doesn’t even have to lie. “It’s delicious. What’s in?”

Eric launches into a description of the recipe, and Jack comes back when they’ve segued into Eric telling Alexei a story about his intern at work mixing up social media logins and posting things to the wrong accounts. Somehow in Eric’s tones of genteel outrage it’s hilarious, even if Alexei isn’t contributing much besides laughter.

“I swear,” Eric says finally, “if she wasn’t so nice I’d—“

“Send her back to the farm?” Jack finishes, dropping a kiss on top of his head.

“You know it,” Eric says, full of authority. “Set the table, dinner’s ready.”

Alexei gets up to help. Jack passes him the cutlery and sets out the placemats, the three of them keeping their glasses. It’s… cosy, for lack of a better word. Alexei has always liked this house, the one they bought when Eric graduated and got his first job in Providence. It’s old and timber-framed, in a part of town Jack had shyly admitted reminded him of their old neighbourhood at Samwell. Alexei has enjoyed their rotating cast of weird guests as well, like their friend the doctor who teaches at Tufts and Jack’s weird lawyer who won’t tell anyone his name. Tonight it’s just them, though, and Alexei feels out of place somehow, over-sized, as though the house isn’t made to fit him.

Eric keeps the conversation going and then, once the desserts are out and Alexei has cleared their plates, Jack and Eric give each other a Look. It’s the kind of look married people share, Alexei thinks; the kind that imitates telepathy, the silent communication of people who’ve learned each other too well.

“We need to talk about your plans,” Jack says, because he’s always been better at the things that require no subtlety.

“I’m still playing,” Alexei says, pushing his fork slowly into the blueberry pie. “I’m keep playing this season.”

“Okay.” Jack pauses to compliment Eric on the pie, which prompts Eric to raise both eyebrows at him with comically widened eyes. “Uh. Right, okay. Will you take time off if Kent can’t come to Providence?”

“Is still—“ Alexei wishes there were words for this, but his vocabulary has never had to extend to this before, this contingency planning and emotional circle-running. “Too early, yes? I’ll tell you when I’m knowing what’s to tell.”

“Okay,” Jack says again, letting silence settle in between them.

“Well, you know where to come if you need help,” Eric says brightly. “I remember when this one broke his jaw—“

“Don’t remind me,” Jack grimaces.

“—I had to come up with new smoothies for a month, and he was such a _pain_ about it,” Eric continues. “So believe me, I know from bad patients. And let me tell you, hockey players are the worst. Sorry.”

Jack smiles with maturity-engendered good humour, but Alexei, usually so willing to join in with their easy settled-ness, can’t make the leap tonight. He finishes his pie and doesn’t mention that nobody is saying what he’s thinking: he has no idea if he and Kent can live together like this, with Kent at a loose end. Nobody is ready to say that if Kent is coming to Providence instead of trying to get to as many Aces games on the bench as he can, then the conclusion is obvious. Alexei musters a smile, banishes the image of Kent hissing “I can do it” with drugged fury and gets up to help with the dishes.

 

NOVEMBER

 

Kent flies out to Providence as soon as he’s cleared to be on a plane. Alexei finds him at the airport at the beginning of November with Leo, whose connecting flight will take him back to New York. Leo has both bags and Kent looks drained and thin. Alexei has always been wary of how quickly Kent drops weight, so alien to his own experience of easy conditioning. Once, when he went down with a bad upper-body injury, Alexei came back heavier, but that was definitely also just a love of eating at play and an abundance of hand-delivered baked goods courtesy of one Eric Bittle. Kent catches sight of him and smiles, and Alexei has almost never been happier to see his offset teeth.

Alexei wraps him in his arms with too little care, and Kent grumbles indistinctly into his chest before he drops a crutch and grabs him in return, blunt nails digging into Alexei’s sides with surprising force.

“So it turns out flying injured sucks way more than regular flying,” Kent says, pulling back. “News at ten.”

“I know where my children are,” Leo quips, handing Alexei Kent’s bag. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay for a bit?”

“No, Dad, come on, look, he’s dying to take care of me,” Kent says, knocking Alexei in the bicep. “Go home, take a break.”

Alexei tries to thank Leo for being there when he couldn’t, but Leo just waves him off. “I’ll see you guys soon, okay? I’ll come down. Call me if you need anything.” He looks Alexei in the eye. “I mean it.”

They make sure Leo gets on his way for flight connections with no trouble, and then Alexei has Kent all to himself for a wonderful second, and can’t resist reeling him in for another hug. Kent makes a token noise of protest but curls into him immediately, clutching at his shirt. Alexei lets go long enough to steer them over to special baggage to wait for the cat carrier, and Kent inches over until he’s leaning against Alexei again, left side taking all his weight as Kent balances on his better leg. Alexei throws and arm across his shoulders, burying his nose in the crown of Kent’s hair. He’s hit viscerally by the scent of him, plane-stale but unmistakable; expensive shampoo and the pervasive hockey smell of old hats and Kent’s weird, acrid soap. He smells like home, and Alexei thinks he’d trade a lot to be able to hold him like this all the time. The novelty has never quite worn off of touching him in public, where anyone might see. For a few years it was a kind of statement between them, a risk taken and a risk rewarded.

“Fuck, I missed you so much,” Kent breathes, barely more than a whisper. He’s looking at the floor, frosted eyelashes sweeping his stark cheekbones. “My entire body hurts.”

“I’m plan on spoiling you,” Alexei says, scraping a fingernail across the bottom of Kent’s sleeve, relieved at the feel of his skin warm beneath the fabric.

“I don’t know how much more of that I can take,” Kent says, but he’s smiling, and then he lurches forward for the cat carrier before Alexei manages to convince him he should let someone else carry it. Alexei hopes Kit will forgive them the indignity of travel, but if she’s here that means Kent is planning on staying a while, and Alexei thinks he can sacrifice his rugs for that.

-

Kent is a good patient, contrary to Eric’s prophecy, which makes it even more frustrating whenever he has a setback. He also, Alexei discovers, has a deep reluctance to talk about it when it happens. Of course, part of that can be blamed on the fact that Alexei is out of town, and isn’t there when he gets the news.

The thing is, the doctors in Las Vegas decided to let Kent’s breaks heal before doing anything to his knee, and so he’s probably going to have to wear a brace until they schedule the operation. Alexei has discovered that Kent also has something of a streak of genius when it comes to this, because the first night he spends in Alexei’s bed, he positions them in such a way that Alexei can hold him still with one hand and one knee, and Kent can relax into the hold without struggling for it and sigh out a curse into the curve of Alexei’s shoulder when Alexei brings him off, torturously slow, with his other hand. The second night he’s too tired, and the third he’s in too much pain, too long left between painkillers and too long on his feet, but they find a rhythm anyway.

Kent goes to gentle PT and Alexei goes to practice and they meet at home for TV shows Kent falls asleep halfway through and takeout Alexei eats most of. Kit scratches the living hell out of Alexei’s couch despite the cat tree he’s bought her but she hasn’t peed in his bedroom, so he thinks they’ve achieved a territorial truce.

Alexei goes on a roadie at the end of November and gets a call from Kent, who sounds a little strangled, but otherwise about the same as he usually does on the phone. Alexei finds it impossible still to gauge nuance if it’s voice-only, so he flicks on the camera and is struck by the image of Kent’s face from a strange angle, soda-lit in the night filter and tired. “The docs here think there might be a bone chip in my knee,” he says, rubbing at his eyes. “I need another surgery, but if they do it then I might be able to put some weight on it before the replacement. Stave it off.”

It’s come to this, now: increments of improvement. A bit of weight here, a day with fewer painkillers there, a night where Kent doesn’t fall asleep at eight thirty with Kit on his chest from the sheer exhaustion of recovery.

Alexei has learned to use every kind of compression cooler on the market, and has rubbed cream into every new scar Kent has to soften them slightly, feeling the ridges of plates and screws under his skin. The break is healing. The knee is bad. Kent is better on the crutches now, and doesn’t spend every moment of his day loudly cursing about them, and in a way, that almost seems worse.

“You want to do it?”

“Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. They can do it here, I spoke to the doctors at home, but— I don’t know if it’s worth it, you know? Another general? Another…”

Another set of stitches. Another week imprisoned in bed. Another stretch of time blurred by the helplessness Alexei feels whenever Kent is in pain. “Maybe you do it now, it’s better when you have to do replacement?”

Kent rubs at his eyes, and Alexei aches to be there with him, just to pull the tension out of his scalp with his fingers, maybe kiss him, if Kent is willing, if that’s the kind of comfort he's able to take. Instead, Alexei is in Nashville, and tomorrow he’ll be in Charleston, and the day after he’ll be in Tampa. It’s not as if Kent needs a babysitter, but Alexei can’t escape the facts: there is nothing he wants to do less right now than travel.

It hurts, but not as much as any of the rest of it. It’s an ache, a longing, the same thing he felt when he loved Kent but thought he could never have him. The hotel room is so beige, and even not having a roommate this time doesn’t take the edge off. If anything he’d have preferred one, but everyone is giving him space when he doesn’t want it, knowing he might have to answer calls in the middle of the night.

“Hey,” Alexei says, when Kent looks zoned-out, biting his lip with his eyes down. “I’m just thinking, when we first together, you tell me about time you fall out of tree, when you were small. Remember?”

Kent huffs a laugh, phone jolting in his hand. “Yeah. I was eleven, and I wasn’t supposed to be up there, but I thought there was—“

“A cat,” Alexei says fondly. “And I’m tell you is making perfect sense, you caring more about cat than you.”

“I didn’t break anything that time,” Kent says wistfully, front-lit from the phone’s glow, the familiar, warm-toned bedroom behind him a distant blur.

“Except for roof of garden shed,” Alexei remembers, picturing it again, a small, tow-headed child scrambling in pursuit of a phantom animal and overstretching himself, throwing himself into it with no concern for his own little body. “Not so important.”

Kent laughs again, and Alexei wants to bottle the sound and keep it, hold it in reserve for when next they need it. “I miss you,” Kent says, finally, looking away from the camera.

Alexei’s entire chest constricts with the force of it, hearing him say it out loud. If even a fraction of it makes it out of his mouth, there’s always more Kent isn't saying. Alexei can guess at it now, but he’s still not telepathic, not able to crack open the opacity Kent wears like armour sometimes. He can only coax his guard down, and wait for him to remember a place of safety. “I think— I think maybe I retire this year. This season. Am getting too old for climbing trees too.”

Kent frowns at the phone, pale eyebrows drawing right down towards the bridge of his nose. “No you’re not. Don’t say that.”

“Been thinking it for a while,” Alexei tells him. “Maybe is the right time?”

“You don’t have to— just because I’m—“ Kent cuts himself off, pressing a finger to his bottom lip and dragging at it, fighting past whatever he’s had to take to stave off the pain. “If this is because you’re… if it’s _pity_ I—“

“No!” Alexei sits up, blankets falling off his chest. “Kent, no. Of course is not that. Is just maybe time I’m wanting more with you, not— not always in hotels. Was happy when you came to Providence. Means I get to see you more. Take care of you.”

“Yeah, well, I never needed it before,” Kent says, tired and blurry and hurt.

Alexei scrubs a hand over his face, wishing he was there, that they could have this conversation without both of them scrambling for words for different reasons. “You’re not having to need it for me to want to.”

“Just—“ Kent sighs. “Sorry. I’m sorry. But don’t— don’t say shit like that without meaning it, okay? I know I’m— I know it’s tiring.”

“It’s not,” Alexei says. “I love you. It’s not tiring.”

“Okay.” Kent looks at him for a long second, as though he can somehow see past the limits of the camera’s view. “You too,” he says quickly, mouth pulling to one side. “Goodnight. Good luck tomorrow. Don’t break a leg. It really sucks.”

-

When Kent turned thirty, Alexei took him to Ibiza for his birthday as a joke. He’d asked around, and finally Sasha had sent him a bunch of websites for ridiculous, blue-tiled houses with pools dripping into the ocean. _Right next to the clubs!!!_ he’d written, seemingly delighted to share his enthusiasm for partying with Alexei for Kent’s benefit. _You can dance him right into bed! Very private!_ Alexei had been less than impressed by the three-line string of eggplant emojis that had followed, but the sentiment had been greatly appreciated. Even if that sentiment was evidently ‘dick him into oblivion’ with the simplistic assumption that Alexei would be the one doing it.

Either way, Alexei had booked it without looking at the price, hired a cat sitter with Leo as an accomplice and surprised Kent the week before. It was so he’d have time to get used to the idea and would be able to give himself the necessary day and half to talk himself into enjoying the fact that he was turning thirty instead of mourning the end of his twenties in a spectacular sulk.

“You booked all this?” Kent said, clicking through the pictures. “When do we leave? Did you get a catsitter? Maria’s gone back to Colorado and—”

“We’re leaving last day of June,” Alexei told him, unable to smother all the smugness out of his voice. “And yes. Nice kid, works at shelter. Good references, Maria says he good with difficult ones.”

Kent had glared at him for fifteen minutes before he’d exhausted every question, and then he’d beamed and gone to find his favourite shorts.

Alexei never wants to forget it. Kent had let someone paint an American flag onto his cheek with liquid glitter, lopsided stripes and blotchy stars dripping streaks down his jaw, catching the lights in the dark club. Kent easy drunk and loose-hipped, moving just off the beat, bouncing his whole body into the crowd and dragging Alexei with him. Alexei had wanted to close his eyes and preserve it forever, burned to the inside of his eyelids, but he hadn’t. He’d taken the bright blue shot out of the test tubes going around and joined him, letting the wordless beat settle in his chest and stomach and the throbbing nexus at the back of his head where reason and regret had gone to die for a while.

Alexei remembers Kent dragging him to bed as the sun was coming up, stripping off his shirt in an uncoordinated rush, shoving Alexei down onto the king-and-a-half bed with the pristine white sheets and the view of the water and kissing him breathless. He remembers Kent tasting like fake sugar and paint, remembers him laughing in his ear that he wasn’t thirty in Las Vegas yet, that he was still young for the next few hours.

Alexei remembers digging his fingers into the smooth curve of Kent’s thighs, remembers the warmth of the air and the heat of their bodies and the easy way they fit together, and the feeling of it, the perfect lift of happiness and heat. He remembers the morning (afternoon) after, when Kent still had a purple smear of glitter over the left side of his face and lipstick in his teeth from somewhere that Alexei hadn’t managed to kiss off, and how he’d grabbed him by the wrists and held him up against the wall until they both forgot their thumping hangovers.

He remembers the casual physicality of it, but most of all Alexei remembers wishing him happy birthday as the sun was going down, and Kent tipping a shot into the sea for his twenties with a sharp, mocking smile.

Alexei felt as though it could be that perfect forever, maybe, if they were that good together. He still recalls the exact shade of smudged purple Kent had left stained on the pillowcases and the exact weight of his own body on the mattress, naked but for the sheets and a thin sheen of sweat. Happiness has always had a physical tinge to it for him. Maybe growing up cold did it, or just growing up too big in too little space, but for Alexei happiness has always felt like a deep breath, like warm skin, like a full cup.

It’s only with Kent that he recognises happiness is almost the same as love, but not quite its twin; when there’s love —this kind of love— in the bargain, it feels like a hand pressed to his chest: here I am. Contact.


	2. December-February

DECEMBER

 

Alexei wakes up next to Kent in Providence in early December and immediately wakes him up too by accidentally elbowing him in the neck. Some time in the night Kent has shifted so that he’s halfway to using Alexei as a body pillow, head resting in the middle of his diaphragm. It’s only a testament to how deeply Alexei has been sleeping with him around that he didn’t notice and gently move him.

Kent jerks awake with a hiss, then another, lower sound, one Alexei has begun to hate hearing. It means there is something misaligned, or something digging in, or just a bad angle, and the pain is only just hitting him.

Alexei hands him a glass of water with a raspy apology; the thermostat is down too low the way Kent likes it, and Alexei’s entire mouth feels dry. All in all, it’s not the best morning of his life, except that Kent is in his bed. The part of him that still thinks of it as a wonderful novelty is thrilled. Alexei sits up with him and leans back against the headboard, t-shirt twisted up under his armpits and a tiny bit damp from where Kent’s mouth was. Kent goes with him, settling into his side as they slowly march towards lucidity.

Neither of them breaks the silence again, so Alexei pulls him closer, angling himself so it’s easier to card his fingers through Kent’s absurdly thick hair, twisting a few strands of his cowlick into a little curl.

On another morning, Alexei might move this a different direction, but the bedroom isn’t light yet and Kent is pliant and sleepy, already drifting back towards sleep. Alexei’s afternoon skate is optional, and he can drift in a little late and still make his English lesson.  
He doesn’t need lessons as much as he used to, but his semi-regular maintenance with Masha has become something of a routine, as much as he can keep a routine around anything but hockey.

Either way, he has at least another couple minutes before he has to think about moving. “Hey,” he says, stealing the last sip of water out of the glass tipping dangerously from Kent’s fingers and setting it aside, “you have book here?”

Kent flops a hand towards the bedside table on his side of the bed. Over the last month it’s become occupied with Kent’s things; his watch, assorted pill bottles, piles of dog-eared books, his expensive moisturiser and what looks like several phone wires coiled into a tangled nest, among other small knick-knacks. Alexei will never know how he manages it. Kent’s fingers close around the book on top of the pile and he slaps it into Alexei’s curled belly, eyes already closing again.

“Any page you want, or I just start anywhere?”

“Page forty-seven’s good,” Kent mumbles. “Someone has a tumescent fervour.”

Alexei laughs, warmed by Kent’s tone and the press of his body, settling in more comfortably to read. He picks out the best passages, even if they can’t play the game they used to concoct around Kent’s ridiculous romance book addiction; Alexei’s never been as flexible as Kent and now neither of them could possibly think about recreating the scene in which the long-lost lover holds his breath for what seems like half a chapter. He reads for a while, and Kent laughs open-mouthed into his shoulder. Alexei’s hands are cold but the words are simple enough, and his voice warms up with it.

Eventually, Alexei has to get up. He creases the page the way Kent does and sets the book aside. “You wanting to get breakfast?”

Kent shrugs, stretching a kink out of his neck. Alexei wishes he would eat something, but the combination of painkillers and inactivity has rendered his appetite pretty much nonexistent as far as Alexei can tell. He occasionally catches him staring balefully at protein bars, half-eaten. Alexei wants to mention it, but he doesn’t. Kent is a grown man, even if Alexei enjoys being able to lift him bodily sometimes. He can feed himself. He can do most things himself, except even the inner reminder seems weak to Alexei. “I’ll go get breakfast,” Alexei announces, getting out of bed and hunting for a pair of thick socks to throw on under his sweatpants. Winter has closed in on Rhode Island with its usual snowy enthusiasm. “Last chance for choose, or I’m just getting you bagel.”

“I’m not going to have the chip out,” Kent says, sitting over the side of the bed with his left leg stretched out straight on the mattress, turned away from Alexei while he reaches down for the brace. “I don’t want to do it. Might as well just get the whole thing over with in one go. I don’t want to keep hoping I might be able to find a way to-- fucking will it better.”

Alexei hates the defensive hunch to his shoulders, as though he thinks Alexei is going to berate him for it. “Okay,” Alexei says, wondering why it takes such a build-up of effort to say it, why he could possibly think Alexei will try to dissuade him. Alexei has never dissuaded him from anything he really had his mind set on, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to. It’s just not how either of them is wired. Somewhere in Kent’s makeup, deep in the bones of him, is the profound stubbornness of a kid who grew up too fast in the wrong ways, and while Alexei has plenty of that himself, his flexibility is a different, hard-learned lesson. He wouldn’t have survived in America —speaking almost no English at the beginning and then cutting himself off from Russia at the end— without it.

“Okay?” Kent straps the brace on without looking at it, watching Alexei over his shoulder, fingers pulling and tightening with practiced ease. “That’s it?”

“What you want me to say? I’m not doctor, I’m not you.” He finally puts on his other sock. “Maybe you do it now and can have replacement later, I don’t know, but maybe you want time without surgery. It’s not for me to be saying, no? Maybe I tell you I think it’s better idea to have small surgery now and you do replacement in a few years, take it easy, but I’m not knowing if that’s true.” He comes around the side of the bed, dropping to knees so he’s looking up at Kent, instead of down at him. “Maybe I’m asking you to talk to me more about it.”

Kent drags his thumb over Alexei’s bottom lip, hair caught in the watery morning light, lit up from behind. Alexei can’t see his face well, but he can hear him just fine, can lean into the touch Kent moves to the curve of his jaw and wait for him to say something.

“I’ve been— it’s like living in a cloud,” he says, “except for in the morning, and then it’s like the first thing that happens is I get this— fuck, this reminder, like hey asshole, you fucked up. And I—I’m going to take fewer painkillers, or it’ll just be like this until whenever some doctor decides now’s the right time for a new knee, and I… fuck, it’s so _boring._ It’s so fucking boring, I don’t know how you stand it.”

Alexei grabs Kent’s wrist, gently, feeling the bones close to the skin, and stands, just enough to tip Kent’s face into the sun, to see the red-rimmed anger in his eyes. “Yes,” he says, “very boring, have you here, my favourite Parson, getting better all the time. Very boring get to kiss you more than once a month. Very, very boring for me, so much always having wild parties, my neighbours all mad at crazy hockey player upstairs. I’m so bored having lazy morning with you. Terrible, all of it.”

Kent laughs, tipping forward so his forehead is resting against Alexei’s navel, and wraps his arms loosely around him. “You’re too good for me, I hope you know that.”

“Oh, yes, everyone is telling me this,” Alexei says, leaning into the joke but hoping Kent can hear the sarcasm in it, the utter contempt Alexei has for the implication of any grain of truth to that. “But also maybe you are too good for me, won’t even let me marry you, even if I’m become nice Jewish boy. Is okay, I know your cat likes me best, means you have to keep me anyway.” Kent’s grip tightens, and Alexei wills away the sudden surge of desire that comes streaking up his spine; he holds him like this so rarely, Alexei can’t help it. He still looks at Kent sometimes and can’t quite imagine that he’s his, and that they’re each other’s. “Will you promise tell me when is bad?”

“Will you promise to blow me when you bring me breakfast?” Kent asks, deflecting like a champ, and Alexei knows the window of honesty has closed for at least a little while. He’s so fond of him it hurts a little, the kind of bone ache that’s always just under the skin.

He steps back enough to lean down and kiss him, putting a little heat into it, enjoying the way Kent gasps. “Promise.”

-

Alexei returns with breakfast and heads to the bedroom just as Kent is getting out of the shower.

He doesn’t bother with a towel, and Alexei is treated to the sight of his body, the cartography of his scars, the dampness of his hair pulling it into unruly waves. He’s walking unsteadily, but when Alexei makes a move to reach out and help him Kent levels a look at him so full of warning that Alexei stops himself.

Kent sits down damp on the big chair in the corner that’s become slowly piled with clothes, staring at the bed. “Remember when you were walking around complaining your shoulder would never come back right?”

“Couldn’t get my own pants up for a week,” Alexei reminds him. “Was very sad, you were mocking me.”

“I take it back.” Kent rolls both shoulders back, stretching over the back of the chair, leaning his head against the upholstery with a little smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth. He flicks his eyes up and down Alexei’s body, and Alexei feels it like the drag of a finger, the heat of it kindling an answering burn. Kent’s legs fall open from the hips, and Alexei thinks this might the first time he’s seen him completely naked since the accident, absent any kind of protection or support.

The sight is surprisingly intimate. Alexei wants to touch, to spread his hands over every inch of skin on display, from the vulnerable curve of his inner thighs to the sun-marked sweep of his forearms, the ever-present lines of his Las Vegas shirt tan blending into the secret hollows of his hips. Alexei wants to add new details to the sensory picture he’s been building for years, a map of touches and sounds and vicious little smiles.  
He hasn’t had more than four days off a month for years, and he hasn’t come home to Kent like this in months, and even the languid, under-the-covers easiness of the past few weeks not quite the same as knowing that Kent might be in the mood to ask for something else.

Kent crooks a finger at him, and Alexei takes a step closer, hooked under the navel, powerless to resist and unwilling to try. “What do you want?”

“I was promised a blow job,” Kent says, looking up at him, splayed and unguarded, wrists turned up on the arms of the chair in tempting invitation.

Alexei goes to his knees. It’s not as easy as it used to be, but it’s worth it for the way Kent’s smile sharpens, a glint of teeth showing between his lips. Usually, Kent is the one who enjoys a guiding hand on the back of his neck, fingers twisted in his hair, an edge of resistance, but in all ways that matter he’s had Alexei’s number from the first. It’s never been like this with anyone else, this body knowledge they’ve worked out together. Kent sucks in a quick breath when Alexei strokes his thumbs along the long creases of his thighs, dragging in the faint red-gold hair Kent insists is blonde. Kent hisses a warning when Alexei presses a little too hard on his left leg, and Alexei changes direction, anticipating the sounds Kent makes when he’s close to losing it, the welcome shudder of overworked muscle beneath his skin.

Kent curls a hand around the base of Alexei’s skull, thin fingers spread and trembling, flush to his scalp.

Alexei looks up at him, watching the way his eyelids flutter, already low over his eyes. Alexei takes Kent by the wrists and presses him to the chair, just hard enough to be firm, upholstery soft and plush under the bones. “Maybe if I’m promise you blowjob I get to make rules?”

Kent moans a token protest, but if he wanted Alexei to stop, he’d say. Alexei loves this, all of it, how Kent will let him use his size, wants him to instead of being afraid of it, will tell and ask and demand for pleasure. His wrists, long repaired, flex in Alexei’s grip, and he shifts his hips minutely, hard enough that Alexei would only have to open his mouth and take him in. “Not until I say, or you’re missing me so much that’s too much work?”

“If you don’t blow me right now I’m divorcing you,” Kent gasps, as Alexei’s lips brush the very tip of him, all soft skin and salt.

“We’re not married,” Alexei says, and goes all the way down.

Kent swears and bucks up to meet him, then stops, trembling, knees pressing along Alexei’s sides and wrists twisting under his palms, and Alexei indulges himself because it’s over in minutes. As much as Kent might have enjoyed drawing it out, Alexei loves this, the evidence, the climax, the warm, hungry feeling of answering desire.

Kent gasps wetly for a while, sweat glistening in the hollow of his throat, and Alexei thinks he could get off just like that, looking at him, knowing him, touching him.

“My turn,” Kent mutters, eyes still closed as he makes a quick grab for Alexei’s hair again and drags him up off his knees.

Alexei is only too happy to let him. Kent has wonderful hands, long and calloused and strong, and Alexei marvels at how much better it is with familiarity, with understanding, with a little bit of laughter in the mix.

It’s only after, when Alexei goes to the bathroom to get a warm washcloth and towel, that he catches Kent rubbing at the underside of his knee with a grimace, fingers digging in deep beneath the muscle, his teeth bared in furious frustration.

Alexei gently moves his hands and hands him the washcloth, draping the towel around his shoulders. “You want to get up, or you’re want to sit for a while?”

Kent heaves a defeated sigh. “I don’t want to melt into the fucking chair,” he says, holding out both forearms once he’s done with the cloth. Alexei hauls him to his feet and Kent steadies himself against Alexei’s chest, frown carving little white lines beside his mouth.

Alexei wants to lift him off his feet, insist that Kent let himself be helped, but he can’t and he doesn’t. Maybe it makes him a bad person, but he doesn’t want to ruin the mood of the morning with another small battle in the war of attrition. Not when it’s been so easy to be happy for a little while.

-

Alexei shows up to his appointment with Masha five minutes late, so she’s already found them a table with armchairs that has enough room for Alexei’s legs and ordered them both coffee. Her long, black hair is twisted up in some kind of elegant knot Alexei couldn’t begin to name, and she appears to be reading two textbooks at once, glasses perched on the end of her sharp nose.

Alexei greets her in Russian, and she responds in English with her usual hint of amusement. She politely ignores him while he gets settled, leaving him to pull his notebook out and find a comfortable arrangement for his limbs.

“You seem stressed,” she observes, sipping her coffee. “Hockey not going well?”

One of the things he likes most about Masha is how little she cares about his job, but usually she at least starts the conversation in English. Today she goes straight to Russian, and Alexei doesn’t really want to bring it up, but somehow it just comes out anyway. “No. My boyfriend is— he’s not well. He’s here, actually. In Providence.”

“I thought you meant the moon,” Masha says, closing her textbooks. “You’re not happy about it? That he’s here?”

Alexei hasn’t had to tell anyone what’s happened before; he finds the words won’t quite come in English, so he hopes she’ll forgive him for not practicing yet. “He’s injured. Badly, but— I’m really happy he’s here. I think maybe it makes me terrible, but I love it. I woke up next to him this morning and it wasn't even a special occasion.” His coffee is still too hot but he drinks some anyway, trying not to smile too widely. “It’s just that I can’t tell if he’s happy about it because he’s so… He’s an athlete. We’re not used to sitting out. If it was me— In a way I kind of think it might have been better.”

Masha waits for him to finish, seemingly happy to just let him get it out before she insists on conjugating words he’ll never use with him. “You know, you’ve never really talked about him before.”

Alexei immediately shows her the picture that’s his phone background this week, Kit draped across Kent’s shoulders like a huge stole, Kent on Alexei’s big couch steadying her with a hand and a little smile. She’d jumped off right after, displeased, and she looks even more furious than she usually does.

She smiles widely, and Alexei relaxes. After this long, he would have liked to think that she’d be safe, but he hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with her; there’s a kind of distance induced by very different professions, and Alexei doesn’t quite know whether she likes him or tolerates him. That’s just her face, but she’s smiling at him, and she hasn’t gone stiff and polite the way other Russians have sometimes, when he talks about Kent. “So why’re you so tired? He’s keeping you up?”

“Not like that,” he says quickly, though privately he wishes that was the reason. Masha’s face gives nothing away, but she might also be laughing at him. “He’s not taking retirement well.”

“Retirement?”

“He hasn’t actually said the word yet.”

Masha pauses, and Alexei isn’t sure why. “Have you?” she asks, raising both perfect eyebrows above her glasses.

Mute, Alexei nods. “I think I’m going to retire this year too.” It feels strange to tell her, transgressive, but he thinks after such a long time she might actually want to know. Masha isn’t really part of his world; she’s working on her pHd at Brown and does something complex with genetics. Alexei thinks she teaches him English out of some deep streak of sadism. They’d been put in touch through one of Eric’s friends and so far all Alexei knows about her is she hates Tolstoy, her supervisor, having to fight with Master’s students for time on the confocal, whatever that is, and that she’s from St. Petersburg. He likes her enormously. She couldn’t give less of a shit about his fame, unless people interrupt their lesson. “I want to retire. He’s the one that doesn’t. I think— I think I only kept going because the idea of moving to Las Vegas while he was still playing just felt strange. I love it,” he hastens to add. “I do. But if he’s not playing then I don’t really want to either.”

Masha spins her cup on its saucer, a habit he’s noticed in her when she’s thinking. “How’d he take it?”

“I’m not sure.” Alexei laughs, shaking it off. “Now that I’ve told you all about my boyfriend, you still want to tell me about future conditional?”

“Not really,” she says, “I’m not in the mood.” For an illogical second, Alexei thinks she might never speak to him again. It’s been years since he’s been home and years since his primary circle of friends was Russian. There are things that have happened at home that make Alexei ache sometimes, when he unblacklists the news. There’s a part of him that wants to know every detail of every new march towards progress, but the better, more settled part of him knows that watching and hoping won’t do anything besides break his heart and pull the helpless, angry core of it out into the light. There’s a part of him that knows he’s probably going to be persona non grata for the rest of his life. Masha, though, is just a person, a single one, and she rubs her fingers up beneath her glasses and groans. “You will never guess what my fucking supervisor did this week, it is fuckery on a grand scale.”

Alexei hides his sigh of relief in his empty mug. “Hold that thought, I’m getting more coffee,” he says.

“You’re not paying me!” she yells at his back, “if we’re just going to gossip it’s on the house.”

“It’s not gossip if I’m telling you real secrets, is it?”

“How much would some shitty sports site pay me to know you’re retiring?” She asks, when he hands her a second cappuccino.

“I plead the fifth,” Alexei says in English, sure he’s getting that one right, at least. “A lot,” he confirms, switching back to Russian with relief resonant in his chest. “Please don’t—”

Masha looks offended. “Do you actually think I would?”

“I think one day maybe someone will find your supervisor in a ditch, so…”

He catches the sugar packet she throws at him without looking at it, and she laughs. “Asshole. If I haven’t been selling my information yet, I don’t think I’m going to. I’ve started to like you.” She pauses, as if the admission surprises her. “I was ready to hate you a little, you know? When Justin put us in touch. I thought it would just be a way to make the rent and that you’d be some rich asshole who needed to be able to say ‘I didn’t punch that waiter’ but you had to ruin it by being so nice.”

“I’m not that nice,” Alexei informs her, thinking of all the times he’s lost his temper on the ice, all the people he’s boarded and all the times he’s yelled at reporters. He doesn’t regret it, precisely, but friendly and nice aren’t the same thing, and he’s long since made his peace with it.

Masha looks unconvinced. “Your cat is your phone background.”

“Do you want to come over for dinner?” Alexei asks, impulsive and relaxed. “I’m— I think I’ll only be in Providence until the summer so you should come over. I’ll have a farewell.”

“Okay,” Masha says, making a show of thinking about it. “I’m allergic to cats, but that’s what drugs are for.”

Alexei hasn’t thought about it in terms of planning, but the more he says it the realer it feels. Retirement. It doesn’t sound like a secret anymore, even though it is. He’s got a life here, and he’s going to wrap it up, slowly tie up the loose ends and box up the rest, and move it all out to Las Vegas. It’s a little bittersweet, but it doesn’t feel insurmountable. He’s got the prospect of mornings like this one to look forward to, and to him that’s still worth it. He's never not going to be a transplant, something rootless and spliced, so he’s gotten easier with it.

-

Kent is lighting a candle when Alexei gets back. The night is closing in and Kent has lined eight mismatched tapers up along the sill of the kitchen window with a big scented one from the bathroom in the middle for the ninth. He’s got his phone wedged into the space between his ear and his shoulder. “Yes, I’m doing it, I’ll send you a picture. Yeah, okay, I’ll tell him. No, come on, you know we don’t have one, just be glad we even have candles, I don’t know why you like it so much.” He pauses, shaking out the match. He catches sight of Alexei and waves, rolling his eyes. “Uh huh, I hate to break it to you but you can get fried potatoes any time you want. Yeah, I love you too. Gotta go, Alexei’s home.” He hangs up, sweeping a hand at the ersatz menorah. “Guess who forgot again.”

“I also forgot,” Alexei admits, amused.

“It’s not your job to remember,” Kent points out, perching on one of Alexei’s kitchen stools so he won’t have to bend his leg. He’s moving better today, and Alexei is glad to see it. “Dad says hi, and to tell you that he’s free to come down for Passover.”

Alexei doesn’t think he can put a finger on the first time he realised he was in love with Kent the way he thinks he ought to be able to. There wasn’t a moment of insight or a flash of sudden adoration; Alexei remembers, at some point, finding him impenetrable and a little obnoxious, purely from his impression of him on the ice. Alexei hadn’t known at the time what it would do to him to know that Kent was willing to stand in the firing line and declare himself to the world. He hadn’t know how deep the ache of it would go when he couldn’t do the same. He does remember the first time he ever really saw Kent, though. It hadn’t been physical in the slightest, because Alexei had seen him plenty of times over the years; at the draft combine, at the NHL awards — which Kent always seemed to leave shitfaced — and across the line on the ice. At the All-Star, even. He’d seen him in the flesh as often as anyone else in the NHL, but the first time he ever actually _saw_ him it was in a little bar in Providence that has since closed down, and Kent had put his head on the table and confessed, with heartbreaking calm, that his brother had died, and all the combative, steely-eyed bravado of his persona had just disappeared into the air, leaving a young man behind who’d made a huge decision out of grief and had refused to back down from it. Maybe it wasn’t love, then, but it was certainly something. It was enough to get started.

Kent laughs quietly, startling Alexei out of his reflection. “Take a picture,” Kent says, smirk baring the edges of his teeth.

Alexei knows it’s the first half of a joke, but he decides he can get away with taking it at face value anyway. He snaps a picture with his phone in an instant, before Kent has time to duck away, and catches him backlit by the candles, hair a blonde corona and his face deeply unimpressed with Alexei’s decision. “I’m posting this,” he tells him, delighted.

“Enjoy people asking you when I’m coming back in the comments, then,” Kent says, disarmingly quiet, and turns to his own phone without another word.

Wrong-footed, Alexei wants to say something, but he can’t think of what. Instead he rests a hand on the back of Kent’s neck, trying to feel out the tension, to see if anything will alleviate it. Kent sighs, skin and muscle tight under Alexei’s palm, but he relaxes at the brush of Alexei’s thumb into his hairline, looking up through his eyelashes. “Sorry. It’s just— it still doesn’t feel real. I don’t want it to be real.”

Alexei can understand the sentiment if not the source. He leans the rest of the way across the counter and presses his forehead to Kent’s, closing his eyes. He still smells like cat and soap and skin, even here in Alexei’s apartment with all Alexei’s things around. He still feels like hard bone under smooth skin, and he still tastes the same when Alexei kisses him lightly. “Is okay that it’s take a while,” Alexei says, not pulling back. “Maybe I’m selfish, happy to have you here, is all.”

“Maybe a little,” Kent says, but there’s no heat to it. “Your delivery service came by. Are you hungry?”

“Anything come with fried potatoes?” Alexei asks, smiling.

Kent shoots him a deeply unimpressed look. “You don’t get to have any, you’re not even Jewish.”

“Only because you’re not letting me,” Alexei reminds him. “Maybe we go out for dinner instead, if you’re feeling good?”

Kent, instead of shooting him down right away, thinks about it for a second. “You know what? Fuck it. Let’s go. I want pizza.”

Alexei can’t keep the delight off his face, so he doesn’t try. “Really?”

Kent doesn’t even make a show of thinking about it. “Yeah. I think I can stand to be photographed for pizza.” It comes out sarcastic, but Kent is moving towards the door anyway, and even if he decides he wants to go home halfway through, and even if he only eats two thirds of his food, Alexei will still get to take him to his favourite hole in the wall and will still get to make him laugh over garlic bread and kiss him even though he tastes horrible.

Alexei doesn’t think he can pinpoint the moment he realised he was in love, but he knows how it happened. There’s a reason people call it falling. In Alexei’s case it was like a roll down a hill, a disjointed, illogical tumble into Kent’s life, while Kent came slowly but insistently into his. Alexei thinks maybe it was the moment he realised he didn’t give a shit who saw them together as long as they could keep being together that he knew he was going to go for it, gravity be damned.

Alexei orders french fries as a side, and Kent rolls his eyes so hard Alexei thinks they might fall out of his head and onto the floor. Alexei takes a photo of that, too, and Kent doesn’t even protest.

When they get home, Alexei pulls Kent against his chest just inside the door and holds him uncarefully, and Kent tips his head back and sighs, relaxing just a little bit more.

“Was nice, going out just because,” Alexei tells him. “You liked it?”

“It felt good,” Kent says, scratching his nails along the muscle of Alexei’s forearm, braced against his chest. “How tired are you?”

Alexei isn’t tired at all, and tells him so with a nip the the lobe of his ear, and evidently Kent isn’t tired either, because when they make it to the bedroom, he’s the one who pulls Alexei’s sweater and shirt off in a rush to get to his skin, and Alexei is the one who lets himself be pushed backwards onto the bed with a grin. It’s never really mattered to him what kind of sex they have, because the having of it, the open-carry intimacy of knowing a body as well as he knows Kent’s has always been more of a high.

Alexei also misses him in a way that feels like hunger, a subcutaneous longing that always makes their reunions sweeter; he’s only just discovering that longing can also be a habit, and that maybe having Kent nearby isn’t ever going to erase it completely.

Alexei never drops off right after sex, unlike Kent, who spends himself with abandon almost every time. Alexei is the one who has time to look, after. He pulls Kent closer carefully, arranging himself around him, and even though Kent grumbles a little at the disturbance, he seems content enough to stay where he is, warm under Alexei’s hands.

-

Alexei wakes up the morning of his last game before the break poorly rested; Kent has been up and down all night, the red glow of his night filter colouring Alexei’s dreams, and finally he’d given up on deep sleep around dawn.

Kent hadn’t had the grace to even look apologetic, already carrying a thundercloud on his shoulders. Alexei knows why, but can’t bring himself to patience right away, so he showers and heads to the rink early.

Jack is always there for breakfast on game days, unlike Alexei who prefers to come in before morning skate, and he looks surprised to see him. Alexei doesn’t really want to talk to him, but he has to. It’s escaped nobody’s notice that the Falconers are having a mediocre season, and Alexei is too old to blame himself but knows his distraction has to be at least a part of it.

The inescapable fact of it is that the shine has come off hockey at last, and nothing he can do will convince himself otherwise. It’s as though a switch has been flipped in his head which governs his competitive impulse, and even if nobody has said it, Alexei thinks this is what it feels like to lose your edge. He wants to win, but this year a loss has just meant a loss, not hours of comedown and a dose of self-motivating recrimination he’s carefully balanced throughout the better part of his life.

Jack is the captain. He has to say something, Alexei knows, but he doesn’t particularly want to hear it. Alexei bites the bullet and sits down opposite him with a shake and a coffee, managing a fairly cheerful hello.

Jack stares at him the way Alexei has known for years means he doesn’t know what to say but doesn’t know how not to make it awkward. It’s just Jack, flat-eyed and serious, trying to organise his thoughts. Alexei has always wished he would just spit it out, now that he has nothing to hide, but his anxiety never seems to pick logical moments.

“Is disgusting,” Alexei offers, downing his breakfast protein with a grimace.

“You’re early,” Jack says. “Is everything okay?”

“Maybe I’m not in the mood for talk to Kent about playing against Aces.” Alexei doesn’t volunteer anything else. It’s nothing Kent would appreciate him sharing with Jack, and even if Jack is his captain, he’s never going to come out in front of Kent for anything as far as Alexei is concerned.

“Uh… I see. I wanted to talk to you about that, actually, if you’ve got a minute?”

Alexei looks around the mostly empty break room, sure Jack can see how pressed for time he isn’t. “Okay.”

Jack takes a big gulp of his drink and Alexei waits, unwilling to prompt him further, his mood rapidly souring. It feels wrong to be going out tonight playing against Kent’s team without Kent on it. It feels terrible to know how deeply Alexei resents them for not protecting him, even if there was nothing they could have done to prevent his injury. As a defenseman Alexei has wondered dozens of times whether he could have done anything, been faster, had a better eye for a bad hit coming. He doesn’t think so. He still doesn’t want to hit the ice absent the thrumming joy of knowing Kent will be down there too, ready to fight him for the win.

“Do you want to scratch tonight?” Jack asks him, too softly. “Stay at home?”

Alexei can picture it: Kent glued to the feed, pacing even though he shouldn’t be. He was out of the cast in six weeks and still that was too much time for him to be off his feet without the prospect of a return to hockey to convince him to stick to the letter of his treatment. He’s watched every game the Aces have played this season. He’s still in their group feed, calling plays and debating strategy. Aces vs Falconers hasn’t come up yet, though, and Alexei hasn’t brought it up because Kent hasn’t talked to him about any of it. He’s always kept the Aces private, his thing he doesn’t want Alexei’s input on, and that has held true in both directions. Alexei wouldn’t know about captaining a team and Kent has never played defence; they’re professionals. They bitch about other teams instead.

“I want to play,” Alexei lies, and that’s when he knows he’s finished. He might be able to close out the season, but he doesn’t want to drag it out, doesn’t have the hunger for the ice he used to when he was younger and it was the only form of clarity in his life. He’d felt like himself on the ice more than anywhere else until it hadn’t, and it’s been years since that was the case. Alexei is a hockey player, but that’s become less who he is than just what. He’s been called so many things over the last six years; he’s a foreigner, he loves a man whose public persona is half obnoxious celebrity and half deadly-serious refusal to shy away from his sexuality or their relationship, and he’s personally unrepentant over their lack of traditional arrangement. One thing nobody can accuse him of anymore is dishonesty.

Jack takes him at face value. “Okay,” he says, clearly uncomfortable but unwilling to press the issue.

Alexei fumes quietly that if it was Eric, he’d wheedle it out of him, but it’s not Jack’s fault Alexei is lying to him. It sits like a stone in his chest, and suddenly all Alexei wants is to be anywhere but here. It would be so much easier than wondering how he’s going to play the Aces knowing they’re missing their integral part, and knowing that all he’ll be thinking of is how they might have prevented his loss.

He wants to talk to Kent about it. He wants to gently pry him open and look inside his head, his chest where the grief lives, and take it in his hands. He wants to tell him it’s okay not to play hockey, but Alexei thinks that first he might have to show him.

-

The game goes badly for the Aces. Jack buries two pucks and Alexei scoops an assist to Rajad, up from the farm team to fill in for Ingram on the third line. They close out 3-0 and Alexei catches Andrews’ eye a couple times as they’re coming on and off.

On some strange, half-cocked impulse, he texts him to ask if he’d like to come over for late dinner, and against all logic and a crushing defeat, Ando agrees. Alexei waits for him after press. It takes a little longer than Alexei would ideally have liked, but he does text Kent to warn him. There’s ominous silence from his end, but Alexei figures if Kent really didn’t want to see Ando he’d say so.

He’s not at all surprised by how tired Ando looks when he shows up, lanky, brown and newly bearded. He’s a far cry from the determined rookie Alexei began to know him as. “How is baby?” Alexei asks him, leading the way to his car.

“Oh my god,” Ando says, clapping him on the shoulder. “He’s so loud. How come babies are so loud? I feel like I haven’t slept in months.”

“This is punishment for having such cute baby,” Alexei tells him blithely, enjoying the way Ando grimaces.

“Do you want him?”

“Maybe we babysit when he’s six, seven, can talk, isn’t shitting his pants anymore,” Alexei concedes magnanimously.

“Yeah, nice try, you should see Parse at family skates, it’s like he can’t decide which door to make a break for first.”

Alexei declines to mention that every time he’s been to a family skate with Kent they’ve left early for very different reasons.

Ando heaves his gear into the back of Alexei’s car with a noticeable shiver. “Fuck it’s freezing. How’s he holding up?”

Alexei doesn’t really know how to answer that. Most days he’s fine, but he isn’t himself in some way that Alexei knows he can’t share; Kent is only the life of the party when he’s actually happy but he’s usually _there_ and Alexei thinks that maybe it’s worrying how little Kent has been out since he came to Providence. “He’s getting better,” Alexei tells him. It’s even true.

“Is he driving you nuts yet?”

Alexei looks at Ando sidelong, trying to catch whether he's joking. “No?”

Ando relaxes, subtly, the kind of movement Alexei is usually not paying attention closely enough to quite pick up on. “Good. I’d hate to have to try to kick your ass. You outweigh me by like, fifty pounds.”

Alexei laughs, pulls on his seatbelt and voice-messages Kent their ETA.

The first summer Alexei spent in Las Vegas, he hadn’t expected so many Aces to stick around. He’d been hoping for a few weeks to just get used to it, to wake up near Kent and know it wasn’t a secret, even if so much of them was a mystery to each other. Alexei hadn’t realised Kent didn’t drink coffee, somehow, and Kent had not picked up on the fact that Alexei couldn’t cook at all unless carefully directed. Alexei thinks he would have liked a couple of weeks to just keep discovering him, this strange, prickly man who kissed him like Alexei was the source of all answers. He did get them, but first it was a blur of barbecues, of beer nights and poker games and the kind of earnest violence Alexei had become quickly accustomed to in America. Men hadn’t touched each other, as such, but he learned the lexicon of a punch to the arm, of an easy headlock, of the kind of bruising bump that meant guarded affection. He'd also learned to reel back his own impulses to reach for a hand, to wrap an arm around shoulders or waists, until it came to Kent who melted into every touch with a look of faint, pleased surprise for months.

The Aces had given Alexei shit for weeks: setting it up so Kent would beat him gloriously at poker, teasing him about his lack of palate for meat in the oppressive Las Vegas heat, showing up at Kent’s house at all hours to see if they could catch Alexei at a loose end and take him out for mildly threatening drinks. He’s inordinately fond of the holdovers from those days, and he thinks for all Kent’s losses, Andrews might have been the standout. Alexei hasn’t had a best friend that wasn’t Kent in years, but even if he doesn’t mourn the people who publicly disavowed him back home from Zapolyarnik and Moscow both he’s never quite managed anything like that again. Ever since Snowy got married and then traded to LA, he’s been a little loose for friends who’d threaten anyone for him. The ones who matter have stayed in touch, but Ando has been a fixture of Kent’s life in Las Vegas for so long that Alexei wonders whether he knows he’s being groomed to replace Kent for the C. Probably. He’s pretty sharp, Liam.

They pull into Alexei’s garage a little earlier than anticipated, and as Alexei is hitting the button for the ignition, Liam blurts: “We’re really worried about him,” as though he’s not sure he should be saying it but it’s coming out anyway. “He hasn’t really been in touch with— well, not as much as usual.”

This is news to Alexei, who sees Kent on his phone all the time, and would never dream of asking Kent to set it for his prints as well. “He’s not?”

“We’re just wondering if he's going to— when he’s going to tell us he’s not coming back,” Ando says quietly.

It occurs to Alexei that Kent’s retirement plans might not be as set in stone as Alexei’s; he’s moving to Las Vegas, but only if Kent will have him. He’s moving to Las Vegas but only if Kent wants to go back. Alexei thinks about staying in Providence and it feels strange, a disconnected landscape like an island, familiar but bounded on all sides by sea. It isn’t home, and after so many years it won’t ever quite make it there. Alexei will always be looking for the bridge. He can’t imagine Kent living anywhere Jack is for any length of time, and Alexei is never going to be able to really understand the depth of what happened between them but even he knows how big a deal it is for Kent to be in the same city as him for weeks at a time. It’s a bit like that movie he saw once when Snowy was doing his best to introduce Alexei to the better part of American culture — a doomed experiment, Alexei at twenty-one had thought it was all terrible except for the portion sizes in restaurants — where some immortal cult went around chopping off each others’ heads. There can be only one.

“I’m still plan on moving to Vegas sometime,” Alexei tells Ando, forcing a smile. “If Kent isn’t come with me then maybe we do a switch.”

“Not funny,” Ando says, but he’s relaxed again, little crows’ feet easing around his eyes. “You gonna feed me or what?”

“Yes, yes, having baby makes you like baby, need to eat all the time or you’re start crying.” Alexei leads him to the elevator and thumbs them in. As they ride up to the top floor, Ando shows him pictures of an adorable, fuzzy-haired child, wrapped in yellow blankets. He wonders if he should warn Ando that Kent isn’t quite himself, but the ride goes too quickly, and he’s too busy looking at Liam’s son, imagining the weight of a child that small in his hands instead of just the light phone screen in his palm.

Kent is stroking Kit absently, arranged on the couch with a book broken-spined across his chest and Kit splayed over his lap in a clear statement of territory claimed. It’s late and Kent still hasn’t showered from his morning at the physiotherapist’s office, a compression cooler doing something pneumatic to his leg. “Hey,” he says, mustering a smile as they come through the door. “You fucking sucked tonight. I know you miss me, but try not to be so obvious, would you?”

“You wound me,” Ando replies, grinning widely. He comes around the couch and rubs a hand half up Kent’s face and into his hair, pulling him into squawking disarray. Kit chirps dangerous and swipes with all five front claws, and only exceptional reflexes save Ando from dire consequences.

Alexei thinks it might be the first time he’s seen Kent smile like that in a while, and resolves to pay more attention.

They order Thai and Ando regales them with stories from the Aces’ last three months and change, but there’s a strained note in the air whenever Ando lets Kent lapse into silence. Alexei catches a glance from Liam and removes himself quietly to the kitchen, ending up scrolling through stats on his phone and not seeing any of them. He could hear the other room, if he wanted; Kent’s voice is quiet and deep, something Alexei has always found incongruent and wonderful, but he thinks this time it’s not just habit keeping him down. He doesn’t know what they're talking about but can hazard a guess. Alexei knows he’s got no business prying into Kent’s relationship with Aces management or with how he captains his team, but if his alternate is in Alexei’s living room and doesn’t want Alexei eavesdropping, he can’t help the upswell of curiosity.

The kitchen in his apartment is grey granite, shot through with little veins of white crystal Alexei doesn’t know the names of. It was new when he moved in, and the only person who’s really used it is Kent, and sometimes Leo, when he comes to stay. Alexei, childless and unmarried, has hosted plenty of parties for the team, making sure the rookies have somewhere safe to get trashed and sleep it off, using it as an excuse to meet spouses and girlfriends he might otherwise never see. The kitchen then is full of caterers or guests raiding the fridge. He rarely sits in here himself, unless Kent is visiting. It doesn’t feel like his, really, except for the melted-down candles still perched in the windowsill he’s asked the cleaning service not to touch. He pours himself a glass of wine and sits down at the counter.

Kit wanders in through the slightly-open door and winds herself around his ankles. He picks her up, still amazed at the heft of her dense little body, and she consents to be held, striking up a gravelly purr that does more to distract Alexei from his thoughts than anything else has so far.

Alexei loses track of the time, talking to her quietly in Russian. “You would tell me if there’s something seriously wrong with him, wouldn’t you? I trust you, because I know you like him the most, even if I’m better-looking. I know, it’s hard to believe, but the internet says I have a better beard, which should make me more attractive by your standards, I think. You’re getting lazy in your old age, though. I know the feeling.” Kit carries on impersonating a woodchipper devouring the Tin Man and does not reassure him that she will keep an eye on Kent for him.

She leaps out of his arms when the door moves, and Alexei spots Kent looking at him, a complicated twist to his mouth. “Ando’s got to get back to the hotel,” he says. “I called him a cab.”

“He’s not want me to drive him?”

“Nah,” Ando chimes in over Kent’s shoulder as he pulls on his enormous parka, “I know old folks have an early bedtime.”

Kent elbows him with vicious accuracy, and Ando grins at him.

As he’s leaving, Ando bumps Alexei in the shoulder, leaning in so Alexei, braced in the doorway to the hall, is the only one who can hear him. “Thanks, man. I’ll be in touch.” He pauses, teeth flashing white as he worries at the edge of a fingernail. “You really retiring?”

Stunned, Alexei takes a second longer than usual to muster his English. “Yes, I’m think so.”

Ando nods gravely, and Alexei has no idea why. “Okay,” he says. “Good luck, yeah?”

When Ando is gone, Kent is subdued. He ducks out from under Alexei’s hands and disappears to shower, and when he’s done he goes straight to bed. Alexei follows him in a bit later, playing around in his phone contacts. He hovers over Leo’s name, then Snowy’s, then finally Nikita’s, but in the end he doesn’t call any of them. It’s late, they’ll be tired, and Alexei doesn’t have words ready for what is only just a feeling, a disquiet, a distance.

-

Alexei spends the three days of the break quietly looking into moving services. It looks doable. He could even sell the flat with everything in it, like he did in Moscow. There are only a few things he’d really like to take with him. The old striped couch he’s fond of, maybe. The juice thing in the kitchen he paid too much for to leave behind. The set of sheets he and Kent first fucked on, worn thin and soft and always carrying the scent of them somehow. It should probably be alarming, how easily he’s mentally boxing up his life, but it isn’t. It’s only harder to think about what he’s leaving behind; the easiness of living in walking distance of everything important. The view of the water and the green of the leaves, ubiquitous and profuse even without the aid of artificial irrigation. The university students who don’t give a shit about hockey and the good Russian deli. He can live without it.

Kent wakes him up with a blowjob on the morning of the 25th. Kent comes, finally, after a torturously slow buildup from Alexei’s hands, deliberately never quite tight enough. It’s the way Kent likes it in the mornings: long, intimate, a little bit cruel. Alexei loves the noises he makes, the bitten-off curses, even the bite of his nails as he drags Alexei closer, a furious, satisfied gleam in his eye. “Do you think Jesus gives a shit about gay sex on his birthday?” Kent mumbles into Alexei’s neck, arm thrown over his chest.

“Wrong birthday,” Alexei says, the way he always does, smiling at the old joke.

Alexei thinks his mother would have debated him on that point, but the longer Alexei lives the happier he is in his chosen heathendom.

The gold chain he’s never taken off is still there, still carrying a cross with wide edges, a familiar drag against his hair. Alexei catches sight of it sometimes and wonders what he’s still wearing it for, but there’s a part of him that can’t quite manage to do more than fiddle with the clasp occasionally, lifting the bottom-heavy weight of the gold and holding it off his chest.

He plays with it, feeling the bite of the cross’ right angles against his fingertips. It might be a nervous habit. Once, he’d walked into temple with Kent and become acutely conscious of it, but Kent had caught him reaching and grabbed his hand instead. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter to him. It’s just gold, in the end.

He never had much time for church as a child. The stories were frightening and implausible, devoid of warmth. The space occupied by the church in him was one filled by questions he’s never devoted time to answering for himself; the tortured figure painted multifold on walls and windows just seemed too sad to dwell on. His parents never seemed invested in pressing it on him, not when Alexei was paying in rather than asking them to pay out. Still, he’d accepted the cross as a token of adulthood. It’s different now, here, where the appearance of godliness matters so much more than the spirit of it. Alexei has thought about what it says that he’s still wearing the symbol of something he doesn’t believe in, but ultimately it’s less that he has an adherence to any kind of spirituality and more that it’s a shred of home, portable and tactile, given in good spirit, that keeps him from unhooking the chain.

Maybe he’s got a nostalgic streak. Kent never teases him about it, even if he touches it on occasion, curls his fingers under the chain and pulls, only half playful. The holy days don’t mean much to him the way Kent’s holy days do, but Alexei does think in more philosophical moments that the world is sometimes comprised of small miracles. He doesn’t always see them for what they are, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

If anyone had asked him at fifteen where he would be in his thirties, he wouldn’t have had an answer. He wouldn’t have had this, love and friendship, sleeping against his body. When he first thought about what it meant that Kent might be waiting for him, that he’d fly thousands of miles because Alexei asked him to without demanding a reason, he’d figured it for madness, a suspension of the rules that said it was wrong to want someone so badly and that it could never end well.

If anyone had asked him at fifteen what he’d give up to keep it he wouldn’t have said hockey, but at fifteen he was an idiot and thought that god was a man on a cloud somewhere, completely indifferent to his existence.

 

JANUARY

 

The back half of winter is snow-covered and dominated by away games. Alexei doesn’t go to the All-Star for the second year in a row and isn’t too bothered by it, too pleased with the prospect of a weekend off. Few of the old guard are there this year, though Jack is leading a team. Alexei resolves to watch it then never does.

The cold gets to Kent’s knee, stiffening it to the point of pain in the mornings, and he says the plates on the bone feel tight. Alexei insists he get it checked out, and it turns out to be normal; metal shrinks when it’s cold. Kent says almost nothing for the rest of the day, limping visibly after he comes back from the trainer’s.

Sunday morning comes and Kent has been up half the night. Alexei can’t sleep through him moving around, so in the end he goes out and gets them breakfast from the place on the corner. The girl who works weekends knows him, and asks him, gently teasing, why he isn’t at the All-Star. Alexei, drained, blurts: “Actually boyfriend is injured, so better for me I’m staying at home.”

“Oh,” she says, handing him his wrapped bagels. “Sorry, I— I was just kidding.”

“No, no it’s okay, I’m sorry for make it weird.” He musters a smile, hoping he can salvage this. “I’m get lazy weekend, people get to watch young guys play hungover, is winning for everyone.”

“It’s six in the morning,” she points out. “Hardly a lazy weekend.”

“Maybe is lazy for me.” He escapes with a smile and cooling food, and tries to subtly insist that Kent finish the whole thing when he gets home, even though he’s already taken a painkiller by the time Alexei gets back and is distractedly stabbing at his phone screen with a fingertip.

Alexei thinks going back to bed at noon is the wisest decision they’ve collectively made all day, and tries not to fret at the way Kent curls in on himself.

Monday comes too quickly, and then Alexei is living out of a bag again. He sits next to Jack on the plane because he knows Jack won’t talk, he’ll just do a crossword in pen and fall asleep against the window.

Mostly it’s the same, the middle of the regular season. Alexei calls Kent from the road, and still gets to fret that he’s lost too much weight. Kent holds Kit up to the screen and she glares balefully at him from across the country. It’s strange to see the usual suspects dropping off, though. Sasha retired after his 2000th point, and Zhenya has been making noise about feeling obligated to go home, even though his kids are all in schools here. Nikita’s wife is American, so he’ll probably stay, but it feels strange to think about how many of the people who’ve become fixtures in his life are also transients in that ephemeral way of expatriates. The only difference is that they could go home in safety if they wanted, and Alexei feels the separate states keenly sometimes.

There’s always a way to stay in touch, but he wonders whether they will.

At the end of January Alexei heads to the West Coast. Snowy and Ando invite him over for dinner after their games, and Alexei says yes to both.

LA is hell, and there’s no way around it. The Kings shut them out, and not even Alexei can sneak one past Snowy. He’s almost pissed off about it, but the feeling of it never quite comes. Aiden finds him after the match looking as though he’s braced for temper, but Alexei just shrugs at him. “Congratulations on shutout,” he says, “is good to see old guys like you still having such good eyes.”

“Oh fuck you,” Aiden mutters, relaxing. “Come on, Erica probably made enough to feed an army.” He waits until they’re in the car to ask what’s wrong, because Aiden is a stealth-bomber when it comes to emotional shit and always has been. “I hate to say it, but you kind of played like shit tonight. Something hurting?”

The press had nearly said as much, but Alexei figured out very early that if he kept his English at a certain level on camera he could get away with claiming language barrier as a reason to leave early. It’s become less and less plausible over more than a decade of playing in the NHL, but he figures if the government can lie about everything to the press he can obfuscate his own distraction without consequence.

“You ever think about retiring?” He asks carefully, sure that Aiden will catch on quick.

Aiden turns the corner into his street, the houses set back off the road and brightly lit, gated around every lawn. It’s almost like Las Vegas, and Alexei is suddenly homesick for a place he’s never really lived.

Aiden hums, leaving the car running for a second. “Listen,” he says, after another pause. “If it was me, I’d want my last season to be a good one, you know? Go out on a high.”

Alexei can’t admit to him how close to the bone that cuts, so instead he rolls his shoulder back, the one he’s had operated on more recently, feeling the faint tug of scarring. “I’m have to try harder then, yes?”

“Come inside,” Aiden says. “The kids are gonna dogpile you, so be warned. They’re savages, I don’t know why we had three in a row.”

“It’s okay. I’m best uncle.”

Aiden looks at him sidelong, familiar pale, black-rimmed blue eyes still weird and striking. Alexei had found him powerfully attractive once upon a time. Aiden had noticed, but he hadn't cared. Alexei thinks he could have been much less lucky than to end up with a crush on someone so peacefully heterosexual. “They’ll make you catch tater tots in your mouth,” Aiden warns him. “Better get your aim right.”

“You’ll film, yes?”

Aiden rolls his eyes and gets out of the car. Alexei catches every small potato lobbed at his face, and the video ends up all over the internet. Later, Alexei watches it in bed, wondering when he learned to make that expression, the one that spreads across his whole face when Aiden’s youngest clambers into his lap to try and shove a tater tot up his nose and Alexei grins so widely she shrieks and stuffs it into his mouth instead. He thinks he looks happy. He thinks maybe he looks young, and wonders when he stopped feeling it.

He sends it to Kent, and Kent texts him a picture of Kit asleep with her mouth open, little paws splayed out in four directions, with the caption _ours is cuter._

Alexei laughs, reassured, the clench in his chest easing. It’s not possible to be nostalgic for something that’s never happened. Nostalgia is only a symptom of loss, not of the never-having.

 

FEBRUARY

 

Alexei’s name day takes him by surprise, mostly because Kent surprises him. The 12th falls on a Wednesday, and Alexei wakes up sure he’s forgotten something. He checks his calendar for promos, but even the visit to the children’s hospital is sitting three days away. All he has is his usual session at the gym and a morning skate. It’s a leg day, so he’s not hugely enthused at the prospect, but it’s just part of his routine.

He’s halfway through his second set of squats that he realises the usual suspects are awfully quiet. The gym crowd is the normal mix of eager rookies and the guys like Alexei who could run through their workouts half-asleep and often do, and he exchanges the usual nods of pain-imminent solidarity. His phone is not sending alerts with its usual frequency.

He’s still vaguely disquieted when he gets home after lunch. In the elevator he tries to kickstart his brain into sudden remembrances. Kent is clattering around in the kitchen, and there’s a movie paused on the screen that looks like an old favourite of Alexei’s. “I promise to stay awake if you want to watch it,” Kent calls, knowing Alexei would have seen the titles. “I’m making popcorn.”

“What’s occasion?” Alexei asks.

Kent sticks his head out of the kitchen door. He’s been wearing the same shirt for three days, in between trips to the physiotherapist, one of Alexei’s with some logo on it that’s long since faded out of legibility. The green of it is mottled and bleach-stained, and forces the green flecks out in Kent’s eyes, currently narrowed at him. “Happy name day,” he says, smirking. “I cleared your schedule. As much as I could, anyway.”

Delight suffuses him, all in a rush. Kent never makes a big deal out of it, but he does have a peculiar memory for events; he’ll remember when National Pet Day is but not the exact day of their anniversary. He knows exactly what the significance of Columbus Day is to the point of a yearly lecture, but sometimes avoids thinking about Thanksgiving to such an extent that he pretends it isn’t happening and manages to avoid accepting any invitations by saying he forgot about it. He never touches alcohol the night before the draft, and never has to check when it is. He’s hit and miss with birthdays except for Adam’s, which he observes in August with a quiet phone call to Leo, no matter where they are. He’s always ready to do whatever Alexei suggests on his name day, and the first time Alexei celebrated it with him he’d asked for Alexei’s phone and turned it off, saying that if Alexei’s family weren’t going to get in touch there was no sense in checking for ghosts.

“It’s not fair that my birthday’s in the offseason and I’m almost never around for yours,” Kent says, defensive in the face of Alexei’s silence. “Well, your name day, and anyway, I figured it would be nice to just hang out. I ordered Russian food for later, so you’ll have to tell me what the hell I asked for, I just guessed.”

“And you’re trying to stay awake for whole movie?” Alexei teases, grinning, still too pleased to do more than smile. “Is like I’m winning lottery. Parson lottery.”

“Oh, shut up.” Kent disappears back into the kitchen, speaking a little louder. “The movie’s just an excuse to blow you. Let’s see how long you last before you tell me to turn it off.”

Alexei hasn’t caught him in a casually filthy mood in months. Alexei has found himself, of late, finely tuned to Kent’s physicality in a way he hasn’t been for a long time. It’s cohabitation, in part, but also just the acute awareness of new delicacy in how he can touch him, in when, in the lingering liminal space of better but not quite healed. It’s an in-between; one day soon Kent will have to have the next surgery, and one day soon Alexei will be in the hospital again, waiting for him to wake up and wishing desperately to fix him.

“My birthday is also this month,” Alexei says, pressing his luck and following Kent into the kitchen, watching him pour what seems to be a third bag of microwave popcorn into a huge bowl and expertly manoeuvre it towards the living room. He’s walking better this week, a dogged adherence to PT and attenuation to his limits probably combining to make it possible. There are also sets of crutches all over the apartment, pillows in stacks for elevation, and a freezer full of blue slush ice packs. If they wanted to host a party, they could give out opiates like breath mints.

Alexei thinks that even if Kent never heals the way he wants to, they’re still pretty lucky, but fuck, he wants it for him so badly.

“Yeah, but you’re on your own for that one,” Kent sits down, throws his leg up on the coffee table and waves the TV on. “You can get the Russians together and drink until you’re blind.” A wash of Russian follows from the speakers, and Alexei notices Kent has turned the subtitles on as though he really does intend to watch the movie. It’s such a small thing, but Alexei feels warmed by it. Kent doesn’t even like movies, much less movies he doesn’t understand. He used to try out of some mistaken belief that Alexei was missing out on some essential aspect of American culture, but he’d either fall asleep or get bored watching every single one until Alexei had taken pity and told him he didn’t need to sit through them. Alexei takes a big handful of popcorn and settles in next to him, reaching for Kent’s right hand.

Alexei watches the movie, but really his focus is on Kent. He takes his hand and digs a knuckle into the base of his palm, pressing out the tension there from taking too much weight, carries on with the rest of his hand. He smooths small joints and delicate tendons and Kent makes a noise more pornographic than anything Alexei has heard on film, flingers splaying in Alexei’s grip.

Eventually, Kent takes his hand back, letting it wander until his knuckles are brushing up against the waistband of Alexei’s sweatpants. His eyes are fixed on the screen, but he’s smirking a little, lips curling tight at the corners. His freckles are stark in the light from the film, and winter darkness settles early in Rhode Island. The room is dark save for the ambient flicker of a moving image, and Alexei is captivated by another picture entirely.

By the time Alexei realises the movie is ending Kent has slid over into a three-quarter turn braced on his elbows before he drapes himself mostly over Alexei’s sore thighs. He can’t get on his knees and Alexei doesn’t want him to, no matter the games they’ve played in the past involving just that, Kent splayed and supplicant and unable to suppress his smirk, his undercutting joy in games pervasive and infectious. This is different, ad hoc and intimate, Kent holding Alexei still and himself carefully, lips just a flutter at first, a hint, and then everything narrows down to a flood of heat, of his wiry hair slipping through Alexei’s fingers where he cradles Kent’s skull. Alexei knows he’s speaking but has no idea what he says. Maybe it’s nonsense. All he knows is that he’s almost breathless when he comes, and that Kent swipes the back of his hand over his lips, wet and obscene.

It’s completely the wrong angle for a kiss, Kent lying on his front mostly on the couch and Alexei splay-legged at the end of it, but he works with it. Kent slowly turns onto his back, and Alexei pulls him closer, calling on his hard-won flexibility to bend down to meet him. It’s not filthy, but it feels like it ought to be.

When Alexei rests a hand on Kent’s belly, Kent tenses. He rests a hand on top of Alexei’s, stilling him. “No, I’m—” his lips brush against Alexei’s jaw. “Not tonight.”

Alexei straightens, looking down at Kent half in his lap, hair a finger-combed mess and mouth swollen red. Kent has his eyes closed, a frown creased deep between his eyebrows. “Kent? You are—“ Alexei looks again, looks closer. Kent isn’t hard, loose pants not thick enough to hide his lack of response. Alarm blooms out from the heat in Alexei’s gut.

“I’m just… I just wanted to make you feel good,” Kent says, letting his head fall back onto Alexei’s leg. “I’m not really in the mood for more, okay?” He opens his eyes, all pupil for an instant before he adjusts to the dim light and glances away. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Yes it’s big deal!” Alexei forces himself not to yell, voice gone down to a rasp and urgent with it. “If you’re not wanting to, why did you even… Kent, you don’t need to—“

“I wanted to, okay?” Kent snaps, rolling up until all Alexei can see is his back, the ridge of his spine prominent beneath the loose collar of his borrowed shirt. “Please don’t make this into a— a thing.”

“A thing?”

“A thing where you— I’m just kind of tired. And I’ve been tired a lot, but that’s no reason for you to have to…” He buries a hand in his own hair, and Alexei sees how tight he clenches his fist. “Ah, fuck.”

Alexei rests a hand in the top of his spine, leaving it there, feeling the tidal wash of his breaths, the minute flex and curve of his vertebrae as his ribs expand. The warmth of Kent’s skin seeps through and Alexei wishes it was possible to read his mind like this. “Kent, tell me what’s wrong.”

Kent laughs a little, falling back without looking. Alexei catches him, of course, weight of him as welcome as it always is. “Nothing,” Kent lies.

From where Alexei is sitting he can only see half his face, can only reach around and pull his hair back off his face, drag fingers over his scalp. “Please don’t lie to me,” he says, feeling Kent tense.

He thinks if Kent were able to he’d storm off, or just slip away with a quip and a smile, but he doesn’t, tense as a racehorse in the starting gate. “Don’t make a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be,” Kent says quietly. “I just need— I just wanted to make you feel good. That’s it.”

“I’m not needing sex for that.” Alexei is amazed he has to say it, but sometimes it’s impossible to tell with Kent. Sometimes Alexei will tell him the simplest things and he’ll laugh it off like it’s a joke. Alexei has told him he loves him so many times, but he thinks he can count on one hand the amount of times Kent has taken it without a glimmer of humour, like it’s a long joke Alexei is playing on him. “I’m worried about you. You’re not going out, you’re not schedule next surgery.” Alexei holds him tighter, giving in to the part of him that feels as though he’s slipping, trying for footing on a steep angle. “Won’t talk to me, even.”

“I scheduled it for summer,” Kent says bitterly. “I talked to the doctors yesterday. Dad can come help out, and I should be okay to walk around a little. I don’t want to do it here.”

“Why you didn’t tell me?” He can’t deny that it hurts, even if he knows how little Kent likes to talk about it, how real it makes the end of his career. “I’m plan on helping too.”

Kent sighs, shuddering in Alexei’s loose hold. “I know. That’s _why._ It’s all about me, it’s all about how I’m the one who can’t— who needs— I’ve just been… I’ve never not played before and I don’t know what… what to do.”

His voice breaks on the last word, and Alexei’s heart with it. He moves himself to make sure he’s as solid as possible, prompting Kent to slowly rearrange himself until Alexei is leaning up against the arm of the couch for support and Kent is flush to him, back pulled close to Alexei’s chest. Alexei holds him until he stops shaking, and doesn’t say anything until he has something he thinks Kent will be able to hear without twisting out of his arms. “Remember when you say we have the rest of our lives without playing? Maybe it starts a little too soon for you. I know it does. But is still a lot of life left, I think.”

Kent drags in a rattling breath, swiping furiously at his eyes. “You shouldn’t have to deal with all this.”

“You’re wrong,” Alexei says, trying to force all the conviction in his body into his words. “So wrong. Both of us shouldn’t have to, but we’re doing it. Is what you do when you’re making a life.” He waits, sure that Kent is going to dispute him, but he doesn’t. “Have you thought maybe you should talk about it some more? Maybe not with me?”

“If I can’t even talk to you about it, what makes you think I can talk to anyone else?” Kent says, a note of defeat in his voice that Alexei can’t shake the chill of.

“I think is not like you to give it up.” Alexei catches his hand and laces his fingers in with Kent’s. “Bravest person I know, still.”

“Low bar.” Kent grips back hard against Alexei’s knuckles.

Alexei wants to show him himself through Alexei’s eyes sometimes: he was the one who took the first step for so many people. He was the one who defiantly painted a streak of glittery Aces-black paint across the bridge of his nose and went to the first event You Can Play invited him to making sure nobody forgot who he was, the one who made endless acidic comments about how if being like them didn’t stop him from winning a Stanley Cup it sure as hell wasn’t going to stop him from doing anything else. Kent was the one who let Alexei have a meltdown in his arms the year the Falconers won the playoffs and Alexei realised how much it meant to him that someone who loved him was there to share it. He was the one who taught Alexei how to dance to bad music and how to make a margarita. He was the one who learned how to have sex slowly with him, and the one who once microwaved a whole bag of marshmallows just to see what would happen. He thinks if Kent could see himself, he wouldn’t dare say he’s not brave. “Maybe I’m decide if it is, yes?”

Kent hums, not an answer, but not a denial either. Alexei waves the dormant screen off and readjusts slightly, making sure he’s comfortable enough to wait.

“What if I suck at everything but hockey?”

Alexei wants to tell him he won’t, but if he’s asking Kent for honesty he can’t turn around and deny him the same. “Then we deal with it. Isn’t so impossible. Maybe you’re secretly amazing chef, turn your pasta dish into a brand.”

Kent snorts a wet laugh, and Alexei dissolves in it with him.


	3. March-May

MARCH

Alexei manages to coax Kent out of the house with the promise of Italian beef sausage from the weekend market stall Alexei introduced him to a couple years ago, even though the day dawns a little bit grey and threatening late snow and Alexei doesn’t even like ground meat. Kent makes it to the elevator with a minimum of grumbling, hat pulled low over his eyes and his flannel buttoned all the way up under his jacket. The bulk of a brace under his jeans doesn’t fit the picture but Alexei is so used to seeing it now that it has ceased to be a jolt. Kent limps a little, and they take a cab instead of the streetcar, but there’s the occasional hint of sun through the steely clouds and Kent has only complained once about the cold.

“You’re from more north than this, how come you like it cold in the house but don’t like cold outside?” It’s an old joke, but one Alexei never gets tired of. Kent’s nose going pink in the chill is one of his favourite things in the world.

“Yeah, this is why we’re moving back to the desert,” Kent mutters around the steaming mug of tea he’s got clutched in both hands. “That way I get to make fun of you for bitching about how you’re melting when it’s only in the nineties.”

Sometimes Alexei wonders at how easily Kent adapted to the heat and the emptiness when he first went to Las Vegas. He’s heard so many stories from other guys about Juniors, about the draft, about moving to a new city without warning. He remembers getting traded early in his career when it didn’t matter so much that he had to fly out with just one pair of clean socks. He’d been a foreigner anyway, and already far from home.

It didn’t hurt at the time. He’s seen pictures posted up on Leo’s walls and in his photo albums of Kent as a child, then Kent as a teenager looking undersized in hockey gear. He’s often marvelled at how young he looks in his pictures from the draft, even though Alexei was there too and didn't think so at the time. He wonders whether Kent has good memories of leaving home the way Alexei does, but he doesn’t like to talk about Juniors and he doesn’t like to talk about Jack, and Alexei doesn’t like to push him. It’s enough that Kent will put up with Jack’s continued presence in the league, and Alexei’s de facto relationship with him. At least they haven’t dropped the gloves at each other but for once, and at least Kent can stand to be in the same room as him for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Alexei doesn’t have that kind of history with anyone; he can’t imagine what might happen if Kent suddenly cut him out of his life, what that would do to him.

Kent kicks him gently under the table. “Penny for ‘em.”

“I’m just think you’re soft now, not New Yorker anymore.”

“Heresy,” Kent says, pulling his tea closer.

They’re meant to meet Masha for coffee before lunch. Alexei has been making a concerted effort to get Kent out of the house more, and it seems to be working. Over the last two weeks Alexei has introduced him to Providence in a way he was sure Kent would discover for himself and then didn’t. He’s taken him to the college dives and the better parts of the riverfront and the weird brewery where everyone has face piercings, and Kent has gone along with it. He’s even met some of Alexei’s friends, the casual kind he’s accumulated by proximity.

Masha shows up on the strike of eleven-thirty, coming in out of the light snow with it dusting the crown of her dark hair. She greets them in English for Kent’s sake, then heads to the counter to order her coffee. Alexei catches Kent staring at her. “She’s very tall,” Kent says, when Alexei smirks at him.

“You should be used to being smallest.”

Kent grimaces. “There’s something in the water in Russia, isn’t there.”

“Yes, but usually is radioactive.” He smiles at Masha when she gets back and introduces them to each other. Kent does his usual thing where he slips on his media face and doesn’t say much, managing a facsimile of attentive interest. Alexei sighs internally, but keeps the conversation going until he prompts Masha to talk about the potential applications of her work. Finally, Kent’s smile starts reaching his eyes, and by the end of an hour he’s shown her a picture of Kit. Alexei relaxes, reassured that he hasn’t inflicted an oblique torture on him in asking if he wants to meet a friend.

Masha catches Alexei’s eye when Kent excuses himself to make his way to the bathroom, picking his way with exaggerated care around the tables. Alexei chose the place because it’s up on Federal Hill close to the historical district but isn’t crowded, laid out with space between the furniture for privacy and decorated in warm, dark colours.

“He’s smaller than I expected.” She spins her coffee cup in its saucer. “You seem tense.”

Alexei hadn’t realised he’d been so obvious, but Masha has seen him wrestling with irregular verbs to the point of seething rage, so he supposes maybe she’s more clued-in to his moods than he’d thought. He turns a hand palm-up, wry. “We don’t… hockey is strange, you know? People know who he is more often than not and people think that means they can ask him anything they want like they’re already friends. I don’t blame him for being a guarded.”

“You’re not.” True to form, her Russian is blunt and welcome. “You were pretty okay from the get-go.”

“People generally don’t risk asking me rude shit,” he says, leaning back in the chair he barely fits in, “unless they’re being paid to do it.”

Masha eyeballs him, a new expression on her narrow face. “You gave up a lot for this, didn’t you?”

Alexei doesn’t have time to answer before Kent comes back, and they make their excuses. Kent has a gleam in his eye that dares her to say something when he announces their plans for sausage up the street, but Masha just laughs quietly and lets it go. She departs by tipping up onto her toes and kissing Alexei goodbye on the cheek, with a quick touch of the hand for Kent. “We’ll miss you in Providence,” she says, wrapping her scarf elegantly back into her peacoat.

“She’s nice,” Kent offers, when they ask for the bill.

“One day she will murder her supervisor. I’ve made promise for bail.”

Kent laughs quietly, looking down at the table. “You have a lot of friends here? Ones that aren’t hockey people?”

Alexei thinks about it. There’s Masha, definitely, but so many of the other people he spends time with are incidental or hockey-adjacent. “Not really,” he offers. “Is just— she’s Russian.”

Kent looks like he wants Alexei to explain, but he doesn’t ask. “Come on, I really am hungry now,” he says, pushing himself to his feet. They’re at the doorway when someone sporting some familiar colours barrels in with his face glued to the screen of his phone.

Eric bounces off Alexei’s belly with a little ‘oof’ and drops his phone. He’s already apologising when he looks up to see who he’s collided with and stops mid-apology with a bright smile. “Oh thank goodness, I was hoping the invasion of the giants wasn’t going to ruin my day. What brings you up the hill?”

“Beef sausage,” Kent says acidly, hands shoved into his pockets, standing well out of the way, smirk pasted on.

“Oh,” Eric says, smile stiffening. “Hello, Kent. It’s really nice to see you out and about, we’ve been trying to get you both over for dinner sometime, but I know how hard it can be around the season.” He turns back to Alexei, brown eyes wide. “What’re y’all doing for Easter? Jack’s parents will be down and we thought we’d have something at the house for anyone who’s at a loose end. You should come!”

Alexei is about to accept when Kent says “Passover,” in a tone Alexei generally associates with Kent’s private opinions about Republicans and blue cheese.

Eric looks genuinely nonplussed, eyebrows almost meeting his hairline. “Of course, I’m sorry, I just thought if the timing works out you could stick your heads in. I know we’d like to see you.”

Alexei isn’t used to thinking of Providence as a small town, but sometimes he’s forced to remember that it really, really can be. The first time Kent met Eric —Kent told him much later, face hidden in the curve of Alexei’s neck, too early in the morning— was when Kent went to Samwell to surprise Jack. He doesn’t know the details, but he doesn’t think it was a good first impression on either side and the froideur has never really faded. Alexei knows it has nothing to do with him, but he still can’t help but bristle at the tension. He likes Eric, and usually awkwardness is something Alexei makes a point to just push through. He’d never have learned English otherwise, would never have become the person management sends rookies to for advice and a laugh, would never have confronted Jack about how out of order his treatment of Kent was, even if it was on the ice. This time he can’t seem to bulldoze it, too aware that his place in this is always going to be in Kent’s corner.

“My dad’ll be in town,” Kent says, “but thanks for the invite. Alexei might find time to go, right?”

“We’ll see,” Alexei refuses to fall into that one, not with the way Kent is looking at him. “Thank you for invite. Having a good day?”

“It’s been fine, but I wish it would stop snowing,” Eric says, brightening visibly. “I always get itchy for spring around this time of the year, you know?” He shivers dramatically. “Just something about the weather gets me every time. Makes me wanna stay in bed all day.” He looks between them, fidgeting nervously with his phone. “Where are you off to?”

Alexei says “farmer’s market” at exactly the same time as Kent says “home.”

“Well, have a good one,” Eric says brightly, and edges past them. Alexei wants to stop him and explain, but Kent is already heading outside, looking up the street in the direction of traffic with his hand out.

Alexei is suddenly tired, knot in his stomach rough-edged and prickly. Alexei catches Eric’s eye before he leaves, and Eric makes a shooing motion with one hand, looking out the window at Kent’s back. Alexei sighs and ducks outside, careful not to whack his head on the doorframe. “What’s the problem?” Alexei asks, when he catches up to him. “You’re not hungry anymore?”

“Stay if you want,” Kent says, deceptively light. “I’m tired, though.”

Alexei knows that if he stays he’s probably going to walk in on Kent asleep later, or buried deep in a book, unwilling to be disturbed. Suddenly, Alexei wants very much to stay, to finish out the good day he’s been having, to wander around the damn farmer’s market and try all the different kinds of fudge and get the bizarrely addictive cupcakes he’s blasted his sugar calories on more than once. He wants to go back inside and catch up with Eric, who he hasn’t seen in a while and who he might not see at all once he leaves town. It’s hard not to resent the sudden turn of direction, and Alexei almost wants to try and convince Kent to stay. He knows it won’t work, but Kent has lowered his arm and is just standing on the sidewalk, as though he expects Alexei to try.

“I’m bring you something from the market if you’re prefer going home.” It’s not his best English, but it doesn’t matter. “Sure you’re don’t want to stay?”

Kent closes a hand around his own forearm, gripping hard through his coat, knuckles white through the skin. “Yeah, no, go ahead and make nice with Bittle, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.” Kent sticks his hand out again and waits, lips a flat line.

Alexei waits until a car pulls up but doesn’t try to touch him again, unwilling to be shrugged off. He wants to say something but can’t force English into shape to do it, and then Kent is getting in the first cab that stops. Alexei watches him go, aimlessly sad, and decides he might as well go back inside.

Eric is still waiting for his coffee, fiddling with the case on his phone. “Did I cause a scene?”

Alexei wants to explain, but doesn’t have the energy or the words. “No, is not you. He’s not so good right now.”

“Wanna sit?”

Alexei doesn’t; he wants to walk, to pace, to let his feet carry him somewhere undetermined. “I’m want to walk, actually.”

“Okay. Want company? I can’t promise good advice, but I’ll listen if y’want.”

Alexei knows Eric’s accent only thickens when he’s stressed, and he doesn’t like being the cause of it. “Yes, please come. I’m get cupcakes."

Eric brightens visibly. “From the little place in the corner of the market? I’m always trying to wheedle that recipe for the maple ones outta them and Cheryl keeps shruggin’ me off. Want to be the muscle?”

Alexei laughs despite himself. “Okay.”

They walk up the rest of the hill at Eric’s pace, short legs dictating his speed while he talks about nothing, filling the silence. Alexei doesn't need him to, but it’s a curiously Eric thing, the inability to let quiet grow to awkwardness. Alexei can chat with the best of them, but has never needed to talk to distract himself from his thoughts. Kent had told him once how nice it was to be quiet with him, and Alexei had stroked a hand over the naked line of his back, relieved at the admission. He doesn’t tune Eric out, exactly, but he does notice when Eric stops talking.

“I’m not helping, am I?”

“Sorry, is just— I’m not sure how to help. Is like everything I say is wrong now.”

Eric hands Alexei his coffee to hold and pulls his gloves off one finger at a time when they reach the covered market, and briefly the assault of sound and scent distracts Alexei from his train of thought. He’s always liked it up here; it’s raucous and close and everything he appreciates about America. There are people from as many countries as he has fingers at least, and even with the limited numbers of student visas being offered there are still clutches of international kids roaming around looking for a taste of home. He wishes Kent had stayed, even if he's seen it before. Kent sometimes takes it for granted without noticing, these little eddies of life where not everything is hockey and not everybody knows who they are, he thinks.

“Alex? Where do you want to go first?”

Alexei turns back to Eric and returns his coffee, suddenly wondering where Jack is. He asks as much, figuring it’s only polite. “Oh, he’s got a photoshoot today. He’s doing something down at Samwell, but it’s not an alumni event or anything and nobody else was going to be there so I thought I’d just get the gang together over the holidays. You really are welcome, you know. Kent too, though lord knows we’re not each other’s favourite.”

“I know you don’t like him,” Alexei admits, getting his bearings before diving into the crowd. “I’m not know why, but is okay. Don’t have to like him. I like him. Thanks for inviting us anyway.”

“Oh, honey,” Eric says, pressing a light hand to his lips. “I just don’t— I just don’t know him, is all. I feel like neither of us has tried all that hard but that’s-- We don’t have to talk about it.”

“No, I think is maybe… I’m so happy he’s here, but he’s so— he’s not. I’m know he’s not. I can’t fix it.”

Eric grabs him gently by the wrist to get them moving before he lets go and makes a beeline for the cupcake stand, genteel in his avoidance of bodies in the crowd. “This is a problem that demands cupcakes,” Eric insists. “Dessert for lunch won’t kill you, will it?”

Despite himself, Alexei agrees. There are little pastel-painted tables dotted around near the awning, and Eric somehow magics them a space on one slightly offset to the rest, then goes to order as Alexei tries his best to fit his legs in under the light green slats.

He’s no closer to succeeding when Eric comes back, his coffee still in one hand and box of cupcakes balanced in the other. He settles across from Alexei and solemnly hands him a bright pink cupcake with a butterfly perched on the very top of the icing in spun sugar. Alexei laughs and bites a chunk out of it, pleased despite himself at the outrageous sweetness.

Eric bites into his own red velvet with much more delicacy. “Do y’all have something usual you do for Passover?” Eric asks, opening the conversation again.

Alexei licks a streak of icing off his finger before he answers, still feeling heavy all over, as though there’s more metal in his blood than usual. “Usually is during season or when playoffs are starting. When is not, I’ve been to Utica, go to visit his dad, but that’s only three times. I’m always wish it was time when we’re really can spend it together, but…”

“Hockey,” Eric agrees, finishing his first cupcake and going in on a lavender one frosted in lurid purple. “It’s hard, putting everything else on hold. I’m lucky, you know? It’s not like I’m the one who’s always on the road, or God forbid, both of us. I really don’t know how you’ve managed it for this long. It’s pretty— well, it’s impressive, I think.” Eric contemplates his edible glitter with a frown. “It’s not just the injury, then?”

Alexei suddenly doesn’t want the rest of his stupid cupcake. Wordlessly, he pushes it towards Eric, shaking his head. “I don’t know what he wants and— and maybe I should not talk so much.”

“When I’m really bothered by something… sometimes Jack drives me nuts, too, y’know? he does. It’s just how it is when you send so much time with someone. But anyway, he does drive me up the wall sometimes, so I bake. But when even that doesn’t work I go to the dog park.” Eric frowns at Alexei’s half-eaten cupcake before he swaps it for the chocolate one in the corner of the box and finishes Alexei’s leftovers. “I can’t be sad at the dog park. They’re just so happy all the time, and they don’t have the problems we have.” He nudges the cupcake at Alexei until he picks it up. “It sounds silly, but if you’ve got someplace like that, go there. It helps. For those of us who can’t get into a punch-up on the ice for fear of our lives.” He smiles wryly. “Or you could try asking him what’s twisted his fishbones.”

Alexei almost chokes chocolate frosting up his nose. He coughs for a second before it turns into a genuine laugh, even if it's short and reluctant. “What if—“ he’s never said it out loud before, but it comes out anyway, mostly ungarbled, even if Alexei hasn’t taken the time to formulate the thought. “What if I’m know already? I’m thinking maybe it’s— maybe without hockey I’m not enough?”

Eric’s face pulls into an expression Alexei has never seen before, all wide dark eyes and unblinking intensity. “If that’s the case then you’ve netted yourself an idiot. Maybe some things need to change, but what more could he possibly want?”

Alexei can think of plenty of things. Alexei is rootless without him, and maybe Kent isn't without Alexei. Maybe without hockey he’s missing more than he’s saying. Alexei hopes desperately that he isn’t, that the root of Kent’s misery is physical, the terrible forced adjustment of having his body betray him before he was ready to let his career go. It wouldn’t be good, if it was that, but it would be a craven relief for Alexei, who wants badly to give him whatever he can and whatever Kent will accept. He just can't force him to take it. He tries to say it, any of it, but the words stick in his throat, and Alexei just shakes his head. “Is different, when your life is one thing.”

Eric takes an aggressive chomp out of his third cupcake, then talks with his mouth full, still managing to be elegant about it. “Listen to me,” he says quietly. “Nobody’s life is ever just one thing. Anyone who tries to tell you that is a damn liar, and a fool to boot.”

Alexei doesn’t believe him. That's the problem. “You’re getting Jack to talk much?” he asks, unable not to be a little bitter about it.

“I think you’d be surprised,” Eric says, smoothing the empty cupcake paper into a crusty semi-circle with his little tapered fingers. “But we’re not talking about Jack today. Believe me, one day I’ll take you up on it, but I think you should go home.” Alexei knows he's right, but he doesn’t know where to start, and can’t seem to make his limbs obey. Eric folds the wrapper again, then lobs it at the trash like a dart. It doesn’t go it. “Darn. Come on, let’s not litter.”

Alexei gets up, thanks him and goes home.

-

There’s nobody in the apartment when Alexei gets back, so he has a moment to observe it, to look at his space and all the little signs of life that weren’t there before. Alexei has a cleaning service that comes twice a week, but Kent must have asked them not to move his stuff like he has his own in Las Vegas, because the living room looks like Kent lives there, books and clothes either folded where they are or just left in slightly-neatened stacks, cat toys arranged in a sunny corner where the cat tree is, small rents in the curtains and the couches from Kit’s insistent marking marring the smoothness of his furniture.

Alexei feels kicked in the chest, rammed against the boards. It’s been a long time since he shared space like this with someone, accepting their mess and learning their habits. He’d thought he knew Kent well before he arrived. He did, after a fashion. It would have been impossible not to. One doesn’t love someone without curiosity about them, without willingness to listen and an urge to pry out the things that delight them, what makes them sad and what they look like first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Alexei has been so happy to have Kent around. He wonders if Kent’s ability to make his home anywhere is something that’s inherent or something he’s learned, and if he himself have the same facility when he moves to Las Vegas.

He’s used to thinking of Kent as an open book to him if nobody else, but how much of what he knows is weighted more towards Kent’s secrets than Kent’s fears?

Once, only once, Alexei had had to pull Kent off someone in the street, shocked by the explosive violence of Kent leaping from a standstill to visible rage with his fists clenched. He was ready and willing to punch the teeth out of someone spitting a curse at them both of them had heard plenty of times. Alexei had been shocked, just on the wrong side of too drunk to react quickly but sober enough to know he had to, if they didn’t want to end up all over the internet, or worse, in court.

He’d grabbed Kent inelegantly around the waist and hauled him off, up three blocks and one over, back to their hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “Let go of me,” Kent had hissed, vodka-hard and shaking, lips peeled back off his crooked teeth so the left canine —the sharp one with a chip in it— was showing. “You should have fucking filmed it.”

“No,” Alexei had said, alarmed. “Why is such big deal? Some asshole making trouble, doesn’t even know who we are, just drunk and stupid?”

“Aren’t you ever mad about it?” Kent had snapped, shaking him off. “Fuck.”

They’d gone to bed in silence, stolen weekend not quite ruined, but altered, shifted in some fundamental way. Alexei had thought about it; in the shower, as he was trying to get the glitter out of his chest hair, as he was sliding into bed with the sun limning the edge of the curtains. “I’m mad sometimes,” he’d said. “But if I’m get mad like that, what you’re think will happen? I’m maybe kill someone, then what? Then who’s winning?”

“I’m just afraid it’ll never get better than this,” Kent had murmured, not quite sober, eyes not quite dry, pressed up against Alexei’s side. He’d smelled like nightclub and alcohol and hadn’t wiped off any of the attendant grime, just climbing straight under the covers with no clothes on.

“Is still pretty good,” Alexei remembers saying. He remembers meaning it.

He’s spent years and years in America feeling like an outsider in some fundamental way. He doesn't read his own press except for when he does, and sometimes it amazes him the talent the media has for constructing a narrative for him he has nothing to do with and no ownership of. He’s secretly planning on going back to the KHL. He’s never married Kent because he might already be married at home. He’s unhappy in Providence. He’s got an intense rivalry going with some guy he’s never even met socially outside of mutual NHL events. It’s sometimes like being eight people at once, if he dwells on it. The truth, as usual, is a more private thing. Alexei isn’t always comfortable here and he isn’t always happy, but most of the time he is. Most of the time the lewd speculation about their sex life rolls off him, and the lingering insults they still hear when they’re out together feel almost unreal, as though they belong in a parallel universe he’s only glimpsing. He’d been as guilty as anyone of thinking of America as living up to its promises, and like most fantasies it hasn’t lived up to the reality. But Alexei has made his happiness here, and most of the time it’s better than he could have imagined, at fifteen still looking out at the world from the arctic. Most of the time.

Alexei heads to the kitchen, moving almost on autopilot, and takes a beer out of the fridge. He doesn’t particularly want one, but he doesn’t like the idea of sitting at home waiting for Kent to come back from wherever he is with nothing in his hands. He takes his phone out and checks it, already knowing it’ll only have the usual spread of notifications from social media and his endless emails. He finishes his beer without noticing and opens another, confirming appointments without paying much attention. He’s got all the evidence of his life around him; his oversized, light-filled apartment. His career, successful beyond his wildest aspirations. His friends, posting pictures of their children, their pets, their families. Kent.

Kent, who Alexei has depended on to be his home for longer than Alexei cares to admit. It was perfect for a while. It was perfect as long as their lives were too similar to be altered. Alexei feels stateless all of a sudden, amorphous, unbounded by his body in a way he never has before. His heart pounds sluggishly, searching for rhythm. Kent’s not okay, and Alexei isn't either. He doesn't know what to do about Kent’s misery any more than he knows what he’ll do without him. What does Alexei have if Kent disappears, if he breaks apart in his grief and leaves Alexei behind?

Kent has been retreating somewhere that Alexei can’t go, and all he wants is to bring him back, even if he’s not fine, even if they have to work out how to be new people. He's been a new person so many times in his life that Alexei thinks he ought to have the habit of it by now, but he doesn’t. He’s only the best version of himself when he has Kent to make it worthwhile.

Alexei thought about getting a cat once, and then he never did. What if it didn’t get along with Kit? Why do it now when he could do it later, when they got married, when they moved in together, when, when, when. Has he really made a home in Providence knowing he was most likely leaving it? Has he made a home anywhere, or just where Kent is?

It’s almost dark when Kent comes back. He flicks on the lights when he comes in, looking a little grey in the face and unsteady on his feet. He’s got Kit under one arm, roused from her curl on the sofa, her purr a blissed-out rumble in the silence.

“Sorry,” Kent says, lowering himself onto the counter stool opposite Alexei and depositing Kit on the marble. He’s got his hat on with the brim facing forward, throwing huge shadows under his eyes. “I just don’t— I didn’t want to fall asleep on the couch again. I’m sick of falling asleep.”

“Kent…” Alexei doesn’t know what to say, everything he wants to confess crowded in behind his tongue, catching in his throat like glass. He should ask where he was. He should be asking the right things, but he hasn;t been, can’t seem to find the words. “You’re not happy here. You’re maybe not happy is just me?”

Kent blanches, hand still on Kit’s back before she wriggles out from beneath it, betrayed, and disappears out the kitchen door. “That— that’s not—”

“You’re hardly come outside, and then when you do, is like I’m forcing you,” Alexei says, pushing through the dryness of his mouth, and the hard prickle behind his eyes. “If just one of us isn’t good without hockey, how it’s work when it’s both? Are you still wanting me to come to Las Vegas? Is something I’m doing? Is there anything—”

“I—” Kent interrupts him, then goes silent, and Alexei’s heart, rhythmless, thumps unpleasantly, a percussive blast from beneath his ribs. “I just hate that you get to play and I don’t.” It comes out all in a rush, quiet and breathless. “I hate sitting around, I hate that you’re— that everything's so easy for you, that it never seems to matter what happens, you’re still just— just _happy,_ like everything’s fine, like you’ve figured it out.” He’s not yelling, but Alexei is familiar enough with Kent’s fury that he knows it when he sees it. “And then I see you looking at me, and you— you have to stop _pitying_ me. I can’t take it anymore. It’s like I’m some doll you’re afraid to break again, and I’m not— I’m not fragile, okay? I hate that you think I am.”

It hurts like a knife under the ribs. It hurts like a blow to the head. “You think I’m happy, watching you lose hockey? That I’m wanting you here like this, instead of because you’re wanting to come?”

Kent glares at him, eyes angry-grey and hard. “Well you’re not exactly sad about it, are you? Were you going to retire anyway, or are you doing it because you think I need a babysitter?”

“I gave up my family for you! You think it’s pity now? Is _just hockey._ ” It takes a moment for the silence to thicken, in a fraction of an instant, Alexei realises what he’s just said, what has just emerged, perfectly formed, abundantly clear. “I—”

But it’s been said; the nature of words means Alexei has said it, and he’ll never be able to take it back. It’s out there, hanging in the air between them, intangible but no less real, no less able to cut.

“I never asked you to,” Kent says, stricken expression chasing all the anger off his face. “I would never have asked you to, if I’d know they—”

“I know!” Alexei yells, too loud, too urgent, and Kent flinches like a child the way he always has at a raised voice off the ice. Alexei knows he should stay quiet, but it’s so hard, angry tears building under his eyelids and the crystalline memory of an empty dial tone forever stuck like a struck tuning fork, in the back of his mind, at the edge of his hearing. Some things just never heal quite right, and tonight the ninety-percent recovery isn’t enough. Not for either of them. “I know you didn’t,” he says, quietly, deliberately. “But if you’re think I don’t love you enough to do that and stay when you need me, then maybe you need hear it again. I’m not loving you just because you’re good at hockey. I’m not wanting you here just because you need help.”

“Fuck you,” Kent says, voice low the way it only gets when he’s forcing it out. “You can’t just— you can’t just _say_ that—”

“Can say anything I want, remember?” Alexei gets up, steps back, making sure he isn’t crowding him, because fuck it all, he kind of wants to. “I’m American now.”

Kent stares at him, eyes pale and red-lined, lips thinned down to the white line around the edges that carves a ghostly bow like a slash across his face. “Shut up,” he whispers, “please, just shut up.”

Alexei does, too tired and furious to disobey.

He knows he shouldn’t leave, but right now the idea of staying in the apartment, huge as it is, feels claustrophobic, a puzzle box of trapdoors and quicksand.

He ends up downtown by the river, hands in his pockets as he searches for someplace that looks warm enough to take him in, to hold him for a few hours without question.

There are people he could call; Eric, for one, and maybe Masha. Nikita in Seattle, but what would he say? How would he explain it, this sensation of loss-without-loss, of something melting between his fingers? Everything he thinks of as home is Kent. Alexei isn’t American, and he isn’t tied to anything else. He could leave Providence with an amicable buyout in a heartbeat, but then what? Where would he go? He’s been looking forward to an easy retirement of lazy mornings and spontaneous contact, to summer heat and maybe the possibility of settling deeper into Kent’s life. He’s been assuming that Kent had a life beyond hockey, and Alexei thinks maybe he’s been crucially wrong about how badly Kent needed it, assuming Kent wanted the same thing he did for all this time.

He never finds a place that looks right, so he ends up walking until his feet are freezing and his hands are stiff, wind cutting through his jacket to his already-tight ribs.

He's expecting noise when he comes home, a thread of the music Kent plays sometimes when he’s really upset, but it’s silent, even Kit choosing her side and staying out of sight and out of reach.

He sleeps in the room at the end of the hall and wakes at every tiny noise, then goes to the gym early. He knows he’s probably waking Kent up, but finds it hard to care. At least some trace of him will make itself known if Alexei jars him out of bed.

When Alexei gets back Kent is up and packing, carelessly shoving t-shirts into a bag Alexei is not going to point out is his, an old duffle that has RUSSIA emblazoned on the side in Cyrillic. It’s from the Olympics, the first and last one Alexei ever played.

Kent’s not wearing the brace, and somehow his bare, scarred legs look more vulnerable for it, feet naked and pale on the floor. Kit is twining around his ankles, making a weird gravelly noise that isn’t a purr.

“Where you are going?”

“Dad’s coming to pick me up. It seemed easier than getting a cab all the way to Utica.”

“You can take the other car.” Alexei would give it to him in a heartbeat, a small, meaningless victory in the middle of a war.

“I don’t need it,” Kent says, fighting the zipper closed. He stops moving, hands still dug into the canvas of the bag, his hair longer than he likes it and falling into his eyes. “I’m— he’ll be here in a couple hours.”

“Okay. I’m go?” It seems the height of effort to actually make a full sentence out of it, when he tried so hard last night to make sure he was being clear, to pull every shred of correctness and understanding from the depths of his brain. Masha would be proud of him, at least.

“It’s your— you don’t have to.”

Kent wants him to leave. Alexei knows Kent so well, he thinks— he’d thought—that his every expression was no longer a mystery to him, that the small creases of frustration that have settled into Kent’s skin over the last few months would be the only new addition to Kent’s face. Alexei is wrong about that as with so many other things, because Kent has gotten better at lying to him. So when he says it, Alexei knows it isn’t true, but he can’t see the tell, the flicker that would offer him any kind of consolation, a hope that this will blow over with time and gentleness.

Gentleness hasn’t worked any miracles for either of them lately.

“Say hi to Leo for me,” Alexei says, taking himself away before he says anything else he’ll regret: I love you. I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I have no idea who I am without you. Please don’t go.

-

The first time they ever had a fight, Alexei had no idea they were fighting. Alexei had said something about when they were married, and Kent had gone stiff and silent for a while, had refused to explain until Alexei thought back over what he’d said and realised Kent might have taken it the wrong way, as though Alexei didn’t mean it, but the damage was done.

Alexei had explained that he’d meant it, honestly and utterly, and Kent had smiled crookedly at him and said “maybe” and changed the subject the best way both of them knew how, with bodies, not words.

This time it’s abundantly clear that something is fractured. Alexei feels like old bone, brittle from exposure. He doesn’t scratch from the game on Monday night but he also doesn’t take much ice time, and even the press seems to leave him alone. Whether that’s Jack and Georgia’s influence he doesn’t want to know, but it helps in some small measure anyway, to answer formulaic questions with formulaic answers and make a quick escape.

He’s scheduled for the trainers the next morning, so he spends two hours getting tortured by Marcella’s talented thumbs and lets the mild endorphin rush of constructive agony distract him from the way people are avoiding him, even the rookies treading warily around him. He doesn’t think he’s carrying a thundercloud but he must be if the way Jack tries to say something to him when they run into each other in the break room is any indication. Alexei isn’t in the mood to talk to him about it, though.

Jack is too close to the problem, too much a symptom of Alexei’s life here. He plays with Jack, is friends with Jack’s husband, but he doesn’t really know him, not the way he maybe should. He’s never clicked with him, because for the longest time Jack also had something to hide, and that was Kent. Alexei hadn’t been a stranger to guarding his secrets, but the difference is that he still doesn't feel he knows Jack’s secrets from Jack. He’s gotten most of them second-hand: from Kent who loved him so deeply Alexei knows he’ll never really get all the details, and from Eric who seems to have a unique capacity to stand his ground without making it seem like an effort. He doesn’t assume intimacy the way he did when Jack first signed with the Falconers, when Alexei still thought that determined cheerfulness was a surefire approach with every new arrival. He can’t uncover his raw wounds to be accidentally salted by Jack right now.

Maybe he's been aware of his surroundings in such sharp detail before, but he doesn’t remember it, if he has; every chip in the paint of the arena seems newly-minted, designed to force him to observation. He’s spent the better part of years here, in these walls, with these guys. He’s enjoyed most of it, the bulk of it, but he doesn't know if it’s commitment or something else that’s kept him from moving away.

He makes his way upstairs to Georgia’s office on autopilot. He sits down when her secretary asks him to, and drinks the water he’s given without protest. Georgia only keeps him waiting for twenty minutes, her meeting spilling out into the waiting room just before lunch.

She looks at Alexei with her hands on her hips. “I was just going to eat at my desk, but we could go somewhere, what’s your preference?”

“Outside,” Alexei asks. “Please.”

Georgia stares down at him for a long moment before she nods curtly and reaches for her coat.

She takes them to a bistro up the hill Alexei has never been to, orders herself a glass of red wine and raises her eyebrows at Alexei when he hesitates. “Don’t hold back on my account, if you want one.” He orders the same, feeling transgressive about it until Georgia pointedly takes a sip of hers, watching him over the glass with alert, honey-coloured eyes. “You’ve been playing like crap,” she says, once he’s taken a sip as well. “Wanna talk about it?”

“I don’t want to come back next year,” Alexei blurts, all vague plans for leading up to it disappearing, the relief at finally asking to leave rushing out through his fingers. His hand starts to shake. He puts his wine down, barely touched. “I’m done, I think. It’s being— it's been good for me here. I want to thank you. But I’m ready for change.”

Georgia sips her wine, then puts it down. “Should I be trying to convince you to stay?”

“I don’t think so,” Alexei says. “How we’re doing this?”

Georgia tips her glass at him, not smiling, but not furious either, not anything but as solid and businesslike as she’s always been. He’s always liked her, and he’s always been glad she was in his corner, from coming out to staying in Providence to fielding endless questions about appropriateness and team dynamic and every thinly-veiled threat. She’s been great to work for and she’s been great to him professionally and he thinks he might owe her an apology for his standard of play, but she isn’t asking him for one. She’s just doing her job.

“We’ll get legal to go over it, and it’ll all have to go through management,” she says, “but we can buy you out. You’re not trapped here if you’d rather be somewhere else.”

Alexei thinks the relief he feels might be disproportionate, but he reaches across the table and grabs her quickly by the wrist anyway, a quick thank you he can’t begin to verbalise.

Georgia expenses the bill, and they talk shop for the rest of the meal, an easy, companionable topic that Alexei has to force himself to concentrate on. Georgia walks him back to his car with unhurried purpose, but before she lets him go she stops him, a hand on his car door. “I got injured too,” she says. “After the Olympics. I was about ready to retire anyway. It’s not like I was expecting the NHL to suddenly open up and take a chance, but it wasn’t… a good time. It was hard to feel like myself.”

“What you did?”

“Time, mostly. And I talked to someone.” Georgia’s fist gently impacts his shoulder. “Let’s see if you can go out with a bang, okay? Put some points on the board for me, even if it feels like total shit. You owe it to yourself.”

Alexei drives back home in a weird haze that’s halfway between relief and terror. He’s really doing it. He’s really going to say goodbye to hockey with nothing guaranteed on the other side of it.

Kent hasn’t replied to any of his texts, so Alexei puts some music on and tries not to notice how strange it is to have Kent’s stuff around without him, and how hollow the rooms feel absent his presence.

-

Alexei has a game on Friday night, but between morning practice and evening ice time, he takes himself for a drive over to the East side of town, to a quiet neighbourhood up the river.

He’s never been here with Kent, but he learned where it was the first year they were together. Orchard Park is starting to bud, determined shoots clawing their way out of winter dormancy, trees still bare and brown but knobbled with new growth, a promise of spring. Alexei waits until people start leaving, feeling a little odd about lurking in the garden, before he steels himself and approaches.

The rabbi is in the doorway, watching him, faint suspicion on her face, but she doesn’t close the door in his face when he walks up to her, feeling simultaneously oversized and small, uncertain. “Is it okay for come in?”

She regards him, having to look up a fair distance to see his face. Eventually, she smiles, and Alexei lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he’s been holding. “Sure,” she says, “I’ll be in my office. There, just beside the door, see?”

Alexei has no doubt that she’ll be watching him, and he’s equally sure it’s her duty to do so. He can’t exactly be a trustworthy figure, asking for entrance absent community or given reason, but as he covers the crown of his head and steps into the dark, silent interior of the synagogue, he hopes she knows he’s not planning on anything but… looking, maybe. He’s only been to a synagogue alone once before, for his own reasons. He’s usually been with Kent, and very occasionally Leo on days when it’s been crowded, joyful or sombre or just reverent in some mysterious way Alexei doesn’t fully understand, but wants to.

He takes a seat at the back, wood hard beneath him, and looks around. It’s just a building, really. It doesn’t have the soaked-in feeling of cumulative worship he’s expecting, and nothing about it should really be calming, but it is. It’s just a room, but there are candles lit in alcoves and there's a book in here somewhere that Kent has reluctantly explained about, closed away to protect it.

He’s not sure what he’s looking for, but he’s resigned to not finding it. He can’t even fully explain to himself why he’s come here for it, when this space isn’t his and the words Kent used to explain it hadn’t been in any language mutually intelligible between them.

It takes him about fifteen minutes of silence to realise that his breath, faint and laboured, is the only sound in the place, and that it’s him who is the living thing inside the threshold. He’s never been given to religion, really, but he’s also never been alone in a space dedicated to it, and the experience is one he isn’t expecting in the slightest. It’s peaceful. He can see why Kent might like it. He doesn’t feel obligated to be anything but a person. He can just exist in the quiet for a suspended moment.

A footstep breaks the spell, and Alexei turns to see the rabbi watching him. “I wouldn’t interrupt, but the kids will be here as soon as school’s out, so I was just going to warn you.” She cocks her head at him again, and Alexei almost groans aloud. He knows that look. She recognises him. He’d hoped to be anonymous, but it’s not always on the cards. It’s just that today of all days he could have used the blanket of secrecy. She doesn’t say anything right away, and Alexei finds himself holding his breath again, waiting for her to move, to speak, to do something that will allow him to at least leave with his dignity. “Look,” she says, voice low and soft. “No pressure, but my door’s open.”

“I’m not Jewish,” Alexei admits, feeling displaced all of a sudden, knowing he has no business seeking peace in something that doesn’t belong to him.

“Doesn’t matter,” she tells him. “You’re here, so maybe it’s the right place. Maybe it isn’t. Up to you.”

“You know who I am.” It’s not a question, and Alexei isn’t phrasing it as such. She already knows what she thinks she knows, and he isn’t sure how he can tell her more without knowing what she’s already carrying about him. “I should go.”

“I do. Rabbis are allowed to like sports, I checked,” she says, easy with it, smiling. She keeps watching him, and Alexei suddenly wants to apologise for something, even though he has no idea what, but then she says: “you’re welcome here. You can stay.”

Alexei wants to thank her, but the words won’t come.

She waits for a moment, then goes back out the door, silhouette disappearing back into the hall.

He wishes it could be that easy, but the moment is lost and the peace is fleeting. This isn’t his answer, but it’s an answer after a fashion. What he's looking for isn't here, but at least he knows he’s looking. That’s something.

Love has a way of settling that leaves a weight in the body, a trace, the afterburn of fingerprints on willing skin.

Over the years, Alexei has learned to expect love, to give it with the kind of thoughtless intensity of purpose reserved for the unconditional. When he held Kent and looked at him in the instant before he kissed him, Alexei dove in with his eyes open. Kissing him in front of everyone who was and wasn’t watching was an act of hope; hope that what he was seeing was everything still unspoken between them, a permanence Alexei hadn’t ever realised he needed.

What he stopped doing somewhere along the way was looking at himself. At Alexei Yurievitch Mashkov, existing in the present. Time isn’t weightless in him any more than love is, and he’s spent a lot of it waiting. It isn’t right and it isn’t fair that they haven’t had time to let go of some things together, and it’s not fair that Alexei always has to speak Kent’s languages. He’s so much a person of body, of long sighs and easy physicality that Alexei forgets sometimes the fragile glass of his heart, the part of him beneath the skin and the teeth that never seems settled. Alexei has made a mistake in needing Kent as much as he does without realising it, and without realising how much a stranger he’s become to himself.

Kent’s silence hurts, but maybe Alexei needs it, if he’s going to hear himself for a change.

 

APRIL

 

Kent finally texts him before the last roadie of the season. Alexei gets it in the air on the way to St. Louis, half asleep next to Dahlgren with his headphones on. The message alert he has keyed in for Kent surprises him, and he checks his phone with stiff fingers, trepidation cold under his skin.

 _Good luck,_ Kent says, without elaboration.

Alexei’s heart crawls into his throat and stays there. _Thanks._ He wants to say more. He wants to ask if this is an offer for truce, or parlay, or just a shot across the bows, then he realises he’s thinking in battle metaphors, a curious quirk of the English language that he’s always found to be a deeply indicative insight into why it’s so hard to speak it. Nobody ever wins an argument unscathed the way nobody ever really wins a war without casualties, and Alexei can’t even tell if what’s happened between them is a fight.

He aches for him, and he’s furious at him for walking out. He’s so happy to hear from him that his teeth hurt, clenched down to the back of his molars. _I miss you,_ he sends, deciding to be honest, even if it’s the kind of honesty Kent sometimes can’t cope with.

His phone stays silent for the rest of the flight, but as they’re collecting bags, groggy and airplane-stale, Alexei’s pocket buzzes. _Dad says hi._

Alexei puts it on silent for the rest of the day, settling into the hotel and distracting himself with the portable console he travels with, eager and willing to lose himself into a contest with brightly coloured characters for meaningless glory. It doesn’t help, so in the end he wanders into the hall, hoping to run into a teammate or two.

Jack is coming out of the room next to his, a dopey smile on his face that always means he’s been speaking to Eric. Alexei’s social mood vanishes, but he doesn’t want to back out on himself, not when they have two games on the road and then their final at home.

Three games to wrap up his NHL career, and then an announcement to be made. “Hi,” Alexei says, when Jack catches sight of him. “You’re have a minute?”

There are the usual beat reporters camped out by the hotel’s front door, so they sneak through a hedge off the service entrance, laughing quietly, ending up on an empty side street in their travelling suits, brushing spring leaves off their shoulders.

Jack doesn’t laugh often, but sometimes Alexei can see why Kent might have been so head over heels for him, if he tries. He doesn’t like to, but he can. The Missouri evening is soupy and warm, and their feet on the cracked sidewalks contribute to a cacophony of birdsong, a rhythmic slap of leather on asphalt the only sound between them for a block or so. Alexei knows he’s going to have to break the silence, because Jack prefers to let people come to him, and is abysmal at soothing tension. He can also see why he and Kent never worked out, if he forces himself to look past the referred rage of it, the protective, snarling part of him that would still like to go back in time and throttle him a little. Alexei didn’t know either of them when they were children and it’s for the best, but he sometimes wonders what people they might have been, the three of them, without the barriers in the way. If the world been a little kinder to start with.

“How is best for me to announce I’m retiring?” Alexei asks, brushing a low-hanging branch from his path and grabbing at a blossom on it, letting it pass unmolested through his fingers. “I spoke to Georgia.”

“I know, she told me.” Jack turns a corner and Alexei thinks they might be going in a circle, a long loop back to their starting point.

Alexei has had it backwards this whole time, maybe. In trying to carry on as normal when there was a sign for a crossroads like neon in front of him. Then again, maybe he couldn’t have done anything differently, and trying to retrace his steps will only lead him back to impasse. It is what it is, and Alexei misses more than just Kent’s easy presence in his life. He misses being happy with his team. He misses all the people who’ve traded or retired or gone back home. If certainty is something someone can crave, he craves it the way he used to crave touch when he first got here, the strictures of culture never leaving him enough room to seek it out the way he wanted it.

“We should tell the guys when we get back to Providence,” Jack says decisively. “That way we can throw you a party after the season. Eric will kill me if we don’t have it at the house.”

They both know the Falconers aren’t clinching a playoffs spot this year, but neither of them says it. Alexei remembers their Cup runs, both successful and not, with a haze of exhaustion and adrenaline rush, crowded into one body, one team, one purpose. This time there’ll be none of that, none of the suspended time dilation of the postseason to take him to a place of essential distraction.

“You’re not mad?”

“I’m not— look, what you did for me? I’ll never forget that. I was a total wreck, and you made me feel really welcome.” It comes out stilted, the way Jack often does when he’s attempting to speak without extensive thought first. Alexei remembers thinking he was an odd duck, when he arrived, but an odd duck with the steely determination to win the Falcs needed. He’d been right. It even makes sense that Jack is captain, if only because of how deeply he cares about hockey and about the team being their best. His personal honesty comes a little more slowly, with a lot less tact. Alexei will never be able to forgive him entirely for the wreck he left Kent in, like walking away from a car crash and leaving the passenger inside, but if Jack can make an effort so can Alexei.

“We’ll be sorry to see you go,” Jack continues, “but you came out, and it just… I was happy not to be up there alone. Whatever you need from me, just ask. I owe you a lot, and I— look, I don’t know what’s up with you and Kent, but if hockey’s not something you want to do anymore—”

“Thanks,” Alexei says, catching sight of the top of their hotel through a fringe of tall, drooping trees. “We’re sneak back in this way, or we go through the front door and everyone wonders how they miss us leaving?”

Jack grins. “Front door?”

Alexei will miss this more than anything else, the mutual understanding of how ridiculous it is to be them sometimes, that the lives they lead are frenetic and strange and entirely pinned on layers of games, not just the one they get paid for. They stroll in with Alexei’s arm draped over Jack’s shoulder and leaves clinging to their suits, and as Alexei stops for a kid with a selfie stick, Jack disappears with a grateful wave.

Alexei stays outside for a bit, letting himself be approached, ignoring the cameras lingering at a distance and allowing the contact of other bodies, other lives, other kids telling him quietly that it means something to them that he’s here. It’s always been slightly baffling, but Alexei has always been easy with a smile.

He texts Kent after sundown before the game, fingers hovering over the screen before he manages to decide on a message. It’s Passover, or at least the start of it. It’s been seven years since Alexei told his family, seven years since he decided life was better if there was a possibility of more, of some greater truth. Maybe if he’d done it differently, or not at all, it wouldn’t hurt this much to fan the flame of gentle optimism. In the end he wishes him a good holiday, then puts his phone away.

-

The last game of the season falls on a Wednesday in mid April.

Alexei plays better than he has in weeks, but it feels unreal, as though he’s just skating any other home game. The mood in the locker room is one of defeated optimism; the Falconers weren’t in the running for the playoffs and Alexei isn’t taking home any silver this year. He’s not going to the hall of fame just yet and they’re not retiring his number unless Georgia manages to convince him to come back next season for the ceremony. He thinks maybe he will, but he has a couple more pressing issues to deal with before that can happen.

There’s no speech from Jack or the coaches before they head out onto the ice, but as soon as his skate touches the frozen surface Alexei almost feels as though he’s zoomed out on his life. This is the last time he’ll do this; the last time he’ll play in an NHL game as a member of the Providence Falconers, the last time he’ll breathe the rush of cold air and the gratifying roar of a home crowd. This is the last time he’ll take his position up, and all of it feels good. Bitter, but good. The difference, he thinks, is that it’s on his terms, by his choice, and not swept out from under him with one bad hit and years of injuries all coming back to claim their debts.

It won’t be official until the players’ union announces it, but there’ll be a party, drinks, rookies looking wide-eyed and shellshocked, and— and Alexei has asked to go quietly, to slip out of the ranks on his terms, without fanfare. He doesn’t want to do interviews about it when there’s so much he hasn’t managed to reconcile for himself yet.

His career is over, but his life isn’t. He just has to decide what to do with it, which way to travel first, when every direction ends with a question mark. The certainty he’s had for years that whatever happens Kent will be there too hasn’t disappeared; it will take more than one fight to erase that, but Alexei is acutely aware of how fractured he feels, how strange it is to feel distant from him.

In a perfect world, nothing they’ve done would be out of the ordinary. They would have had the luxury of being two people finding each other and discovering that their jagged edges line up where they don’t chafe, but it’s not an ideal world and if it was, would they ever have had a reason to speak? It seems the height of arrogance to assume they were in some way destined to meet, but Alexei thinks there might have been worse things than finding Kent when he needed him. It was hockey, in a way, the thing that they both turned on, balanced over like spinning plates.

The lights on the ice are blinding if he looks up, but he does it anyway, taking an instant before play starts to spread his arms wide and grin at them, all the people packed in to watch and all the remote eyes of cameras floating above.

Last time, so make it count. He wishes Kent could have done the same, but he’s only himself at the end of the day. Only Alexei, saying goodbye to the certainty of the NHL and the rigid, easy routine of life around it. He’s going to have to do a lot more thinking.

The puck drops, and for the first time since October Alexei plays as if he’s got nothing to lose. It’s not the truth, but it’s close. It’s been a bad season, but it’s a good game.

After, Alexei strips his pads and hangs them up, watching the team. He answers the questions put to him with blissful calm, and then the press is gone, chasing another story, writing up analyses of why the Falconers couldn’t drag themselves into the playoffs.

Alexei leans back, watching bodies. The rookies are crowded in with each other, sharing water bottles, the older guys like him settling into the post-season adrenaline crash. Jack, looming into his field of vision with a concerned look in his eyes.

“I’m going home,” Alexei announces, “drinks later, we organise in group chat.”

“Okay,” Jack says, offering him a hand. Alexei takes it, holds it, looks at him and wonders how to say that Jack is on his own now, to make people feel at home, to pair up newcomers with people who speak their language, to mediate with the coaches when someone’s not doing well and to praise when someone is. He’ll figure it out.

“Bye,” Alexei says to everyone. “Has been not so great season, but we’re getting them next year, yes?”

Someone groans and lobs a sock across the room, and Alexei leaves quietly, smiling.

On the way home, Alexei conjures conversations; a rotating cast of passengers appears in the front seat, real and imagined. He doesn’t think it’s normal to visualise people like this, spectral and willing, but he does.

Kent appears, resting his forehead against the car window the way he had when Alexei drove him home from the airport, but he’s gone as soon as Alexei forms him, a smokey thing fading like a mirage. In his place comes his sister, berating him for a lacklustre season with a cigarette hanging between her fingertips, intermittently perched between her teeth. “What now?” She asks him, blowing smoke.

“I don’t know,” he tells her phantom, and then he’s pulling into his garage and shaking his keys into his hand.

All his gear is still at the rink, waiting for him to clean it out over the next week while he finalises his departure, speaks to Georgia, gets his contract settled out. All he has to carry is himself.

All of a sudden, a spike of longing travels his spine. It feels like loss and jealousy all on one, nerves screaming at the mistake of it, the unclenching of fingers from something he wasn’t meant to let go of, and if this is what Kent felt when he woke up in the hospital, even a fraction of it, then Alexei has not been giving him enough credit for carrying on. It feels like panic, like reaching for a rope just slightly too high to reach.

He forces himself to move, to climb into the elevator and ride it to the top floor, and all the while he fights the warring impulses of his body. He wants to sleep for years. He wants to scream, a little. He wants to hear a voice he misses.

It’s been almost a decade since he thought he might be able to do it. His parents aren’t ever going to come around. That’s a fact, a painful acceptance he’s had to tell himself doesn’t matter, that it’s something he can’t change, and trying to would be tantamount to hurling himself at a wall and expecting the wall to crumble before his bones break.

His sister, though, or his brother. His siblings, the people he used to trust with his underbelly. Sometimes, in weaker moments, he thinks about it, about calling, about hurling himself at the obstacle and hoping to clear it.

Alexei likes to think that he’d find out of any of them changed their numbers, but he’s had too much riding on his dignity to want to test the theory before now. It hurts so much less to let the contact lie fallow, to leave it in potentia, a kind of Schroedinger’s wound. He tosses his phone from hand to hand for a while, waiting out the time difference and telling himself that’s not what he’s doing, that his restless, aimless pacing around the apartment isn’t a tour of absences.

The cleaners have had a field day with Kent’s departure and Alexei’s apartment is pristine again, but he finds that he misses it desperately, having the signs of life around. He finds himself in the walk-in closet again, absently running his hands along old jerseys and new suits for the third time by midnight and he realises he can’t avoid it if he’s going to do it.

He just has to square it off, like going down across from someone bigger on the ice, realising that inertia will take over whether he likes it or not. Now that it’s in his head he can’t let it go, and if it’s midnight here it’s midday at home. Nadia will be taking her break at work, and the sky will be light enough to go outside in it for a while. She might take her phone, or she might leave it in her bag, tucked under her desk with the chocolate bars she pretends she doesn’t like. She might be talking with her friends, or having a smoke with her boss. She might be at home sick.

Alexei opens the balcony door, steps into the spring chill and hits the call sign.

The ring takes a long time to get through, signal searching for noise halfway around the world. It hurts that he can picture it all so vividly even so many years later. He might have left Norilsk as soon as he could, but there’s something to be said for a hometown, for the fingerprints it leaves behind. Alexei will never not be from where he’s from, and he’ll never be other than what he was there, in some measure. Not sized to fit, but happy enough to make up for it. Not ready to live a life in the cold, but from it, formed from its clay.

The ringtone chimes, three, four, five times, and goes to voicemail.

Alexei listens to Nina’s voice with his breath misting in the air, then hangs up. He considers dropping his phone off the edge of the balcony, down through the sparse ferns and into the river. It wouldn’t be so hard to get another one. He knows all the numbers that matter off by heart, an old trick from when it was never a remote possibility that he might get mugged, even once he got too big to be an easy target. He’s weighing it in his hand when it rings.

He almost doesn’t answer it, but pettiness has never come easily to him, any more than genuine jealousy has. “Hi,” he breathes, fingers cold on the railing.

“Lyosha?”

The diminutive trips off her tongue as though they aren’t strangers to each other, as though it’s been days and not years since they’ve spoken, and all of a sudden he can’t breathe, something immovable and vast locked tight around his ribs. All that’s left is the reserve of his lungs, and it exits his body in a rush, a sob, a pained, animal noise of longing.

“Lyosha, I— what’s the matter? Why are you calling me?”

He can’t answer. He doesn’t know how to answer. He has to, while she’s holding his voice to her ear in Krasnoyarsk and is listening. “I just— it’s been so long, Nina. Is it so strange that I wanted to?” It comes out shaky, small; things he hasn’t been for years, for decades, even. “Maybe I miss you.”

There is a silence across the world, while he presses his phone to his ear in Providence and listens to her breathe in Norilsk.

He’s never thought about the missing in his life much until now. He’s made decisions and it’s been easy to take the benefits of them without dwelling on the losses, but he realises abruptly and all at once that it’s never meant he doesn’t feel them. She’s his sister, the person he shared a room with when they were too many people in too small a space, the person whose boyfriends he used to intimidate when their father was too busy drinking to notice or care where his children were, the person who told him not to tell his mother he was going to take a chance on honesty because they both knew what it would mean for him to strip off the veneer of denial.

He was never going to listen to her, but he still can’t believe how much it hurt that she was right.

“You’re having a bad season,” Nina says quietly. “I keep track, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“So do the kids.”

Alexei wants to scream, to hold her, to look down at her face— broad and brown-eyed and rounded — and ask her why. Why, if she can keep him at arm’s length but not gone completely, she could never pick up a phone, answer an email, send a letter? It hurts almost as much as knowing he’s been forgotten, written out of her history would. “Why?” It just comes out, childish and simple.

Nina is silent for so long that if Alexei couldn’t hear the rustle of her parka and the long drag of breath that means she hasn’t quit smoking yet, he might think she’d hung up.

“I can’t stop them,” she says finally. “I don’t want to. It— people haven’t forgotten, but…” She exhales slowly, and Alexei can imagine her, standing in a patch of concrete cleared of snow, dropping a cigarette butt to the ground, grinding it under her heel. “You remember Arkady? His wife left him.”

Alexei remembers him very well: his hands, his shocking, acid-green eyes, the bottle scar from when he’s been in a fight carved deep into the undercurve of his jaw. The feeling of his lips, thin and chapped, immediately the vector of a denial. Alexei remembers. “That’s not my fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” Nina says, “but people remember you, and who you used to spend time with. You know how people are. You know how much Mama needs her friends.”

“You called me back,” Alexei says, reminding himself as much as her. “You— is this dangerous for you? Too dangerous someone might remember your brother’s tainted, off in America living in sin?” It almost crescendos, but just before Alexei can really reach for the anger, the sustaining, galvanising fury that had been the only thing to paste over the rent in him where his family used to be, it flickers out, just out of reach. She’s still here. She hasn’t hung up. “Would it have been so hard?”

“I miss you,” she says quietly. “I just didn’t think you’d— after we had to stop talking. I didn’t think you’d pick up.”

Alexei, in those first few months, would have picked up a carrier pigeon, a smoke signal, a message in a bottle washed up in his bathtub through the drains. “I would have. Of course I would have. You think it’s any better in America to be without a family, or that people like—“

“Are you happy?” Nina asks, interrupting him, words too fast, all thrown together. “I’ve always— I’ve always hoped you were. You were— you used to make me happy. When we were children.”

“Yes. I was. I am. But it’s— I’m a stranger, sometimes.”

“We’re all strangers now, aren’t we?”

“I don’t want to be.” Alexei says it simply, as simply as he can put the wordless longing into words. It’s like going back in time, hearing her speak; like being a child again, a person who had a simpler life, if not a happier one. He doesn’t want to be a stranger to who he was, even if he’ll never go back and never wanted to. He just wants— he wants to mend a bridge. To mend _something._ “Will you call? I’d like to call you.”

“I’ll— Yes. I’ll call. I miss you, Lyosha. I want to send you pictures of my kids and bitch about my husband. I want to— I could even hear about—“

Alexei laughs though the tears falling unhindered, now, silent and hot, dropping onto his fingers, clenched hard around the railing. Maybe they’re even making their way back to the river once they’ve travelled over his knuckles, the way he thought he might send his phone. “You don’t have to. I don’t need you to.”

Nina makes a noise, one Alexei doesn’t remember, one he can’t put a face or expression to. “Maybe I’ll get there,” she says.

It’s not nothing. It’s not everything Alexei dreamed about when he was younger and when Kent was very far away, when Alexei felt most alone, but it’s something. “Yeah. Maybe.”

“I have a week off in July,” she says, changing the subject. “I’ll call you.”

Alexei wants to tell her so much. He wants to recreate their close little bedroom, him and her and Oleg later, small voices and little secrets passing in the night. He wants to tell her about Kent, about how strange it’s been to be near him and slowly watch him fall to pieces, about how the love in his life is shifting, tilting on an unforeseen axis, about how he doesn’t believe in god but thinks he might be starting to see why people might. He knows not to push too far too quickly, but the part of him that’s always been full to bursting with all the things he’s never found the words for here longs to, a seed starved for light. He doesn’t, but maybe one day he might. If she’s willing to take the risk of knowing him. “I’ll pick up.”

“I should go,” Nina says, but still, she doesn’t go.

“I— I’m really glad you called back,” he tells her, meaning it, hoping she knows how much.

In all the years he’s been missing her, he’s been furious about it. He’s been harbouring a useful, genuine anger that stems from neglect, from hurt, from the bewildered agony of rejection by the people he had the most love for, once. He wonders at how easy his forgiveness feels when nothing is actually fixed. It’s one phone call, but it feels like a deep breath. Maybe the air is fouled the way it is in Norilsk, pollution hanging suspended, invisible, deadly, but people have to breathe and people have to live, and Alexei feels like he hasn’t quite been doing either as well as he could have been lately.

His last thought, when Nina hangs up, is that he wishes Kent were here. Kent would understand. If there’s one thing Kent has always had a handle on it’s the raw irony of life, and the lingering burn of something bittersweet.

It’s been a long time since Alexei had to make this decision, but Alexei has very little in his life he’s certain about now, and it occurs to him that if he wants Kent, he might have to ask him the things he’s been keeping on hold.

 

MAY

 

Alexei doesn’t do anything as rash as drive upstate to make a declaration to Kent on his doorstep. He knows exactly what kind of surprises Kent likes, and early mistakes aside he’s gotten better at not treading on the edges of that. He thinks maybe Kent only let him in the first time because they needed each other, then, two strangers reaching for a hand.

Instead, he tells Leo he’s coming, and waits for Kent to tell him not to.

Leo calls him at lunchtime on Thursday. Alexei picks up with a shaking hand, part of him desperately trying to convince the rest that it’s better not to know, but of course that’s a lie. “Hello,” he croaks. “I didn’t want to— not be the right kind of surprise. And is your house, so.”

Leo waits until Alexei’s finished to say anything. “I’m not so good at this,” Leo says. “It’s never been easy. And Kent and I, we’re not really… it’s not our style. It took us a long time.” He pauses. “It took me a long time, more than Kent, I guess. You should come talk to him. I’ll be glad to see you.”

“You’re not… think I shouldn’t come?”

“Remember when I asked you not to let him come back to New York?”

Alexei had forgotten, and says as much. He remembers it now, Leo’s sidelong glance, the strange tenor of his words, as though he was speaking in shorthand for something Alexei had no grasp on then. Regression or defeat, or just a hiding place to lick wounds. Alexei knows as well as anyone how unhappy Kent was at home as a kid. He’s the one who’s listened to him in the dark, when he let slip little confessions of fear, of anger, of crushing jealousy. Alexei knew it well from keeping his own self company in Norilsk, though in him jealousy was more longing, wordless and unformed, a thing he never thought he’d get to have and so remaining unarticulated, a shadow of want.

“If he wants to stay—“

“Talk to him,” Leo says, kindly. “We missed you at Seder. I’d like to have it together next year.”

It’s ridiculous to get choked up on the phone over something that might never happen, but Alexei thinks even Kent would say it outright, if this was over for them, if there was nothing worth coming upstate for. “Okay. You’ll tell him?”

“I’ll tell him.”

Alexei hangs up too quickly, not trusting himself not to ask for something impossible.

He sleeps badly, but not for lack of trying. Friday morning Alexei gets up early, goes to the gym and gets in the car damp from the shower, bag already in the trunk.

It’s a four and a half hour drive from providence to Utica on a good day, but Alexei stops halfway for gas and food, and for a minute out of the city. It’s not beautiful on the highway, but it’s a change of scenery. He walks around at the rest stop for a while, too restless to settle on any of the outdoor tables but enjoying the spring sunlight, the rushing drone of cars on the road that he’s always loved in some paradoxical way. They’re all going somewhere, all piloted by human hands, or mostly by. It’s easy to distract himself by wondering where they’re going and what they’ll do when they get there, these glass and moulded fibre carapaces rushing past at speed.

He gets back in his and sits in it for a second; it’s not the same car he and Kent first kissed in, or even the second. Alexei has replaced it with whim and boredom several times, one indulgence he’s never shied away from. He wonders if it might be worth driving it to Las Vegas one day, to see all the places he’s flown to from the ground.

The engine starts with a pleasing rumble, and then he’s got two and a half hours more road to go, and he sets out to clear his mind and enjoy it. Whatever happens in Utica, he’s going to handle it.

It’s begun to feel real, in some tangible way, now that he’s left Providence. The world is in sharper view somehow, now that he knows he’s never going back to the NHL, and has a whole summer ahead of him that won’t necessarily be filled with training, with the endless rotational waiting for autumn, for ice and adrenaline and separation. It’s freeing. He rolls the window down and turns the music off, letting the hot wind blow past his ears.

He arrives in Utica in the late afternoon. It looks the same as it always has; industrial and run-down, but surprisingly vibrant for all that. Alexei has spent enough time here to know which building has the Somalian market and which has the best Vietnamese food, where the good, thick Arabic coffee is and the best breakfast diner. He can imagine Kent here as a teenager, sneaking out to walk around, but he’s never been sure if that’s just his retroactive longing to know everything he’s never talked about. Alexei will never have known him before Jack, before Adam, before the terrible, brave year of his coming out. Alexei will never have known him as a brash sixteen year old growing up here in the ruins. He only knows the people they’ve become since they met, and so coming here has always had an air of faint mystery to it, a time capsule he doesn’t have the key to.

The suburb Leo lives in is about twenty minutes from town, leafy and green. It still has an air of dilapidation to it that has always made Alexei feel more at home, houses leaning under sagging roofs and overgrown yards with canted fences. It’s not the picture-perfect regularity of Providence, or the America he remembers being so fascinated by as a kid. It’s nothing at all like dessicated, vertical Norilsk, but it’s not mired in the mindless affluence of places that have never relied on industry to survive, either.

Alexei parks and sits outside the house for a little bit, looking at it. It’s had a fresh coat of paint, and few patches of new roof tiles, and he knows that Leo will never move out, will accept as much help as his pride can take and no more, and will drive his truck until it’s rattling, no matter how many times Kent tries to buy him a new one.

“Just don’t put me in a home,” Leo said once, smiling, sipping his beer on the porch. “That’s no good way to die.”

Kent had gone inside, wordlessly furious.

Alexei gets out of the car, crosses the yard and knocks on the door, even though it’s very likely open.

Kent answers it in his oldest sweatpants, his hair a mess of damp curls falling too long into his eyes. He looks up at Alexei and Alexei’s breath catches in his chest. It’s so familiar, it’s like being kicked. Every time he’s come to Las Vegas in the off-season, every time he’s had a door opened to him and found Kent on the other side it’s felt like this should, but it’s different this time. Alexei is uncertain of his welcome, and a part of him is still furious. Kent walked away when Alexei would have done anything he’d asked for him. Kent left and hasn’t called, hasn’t said a word of his intentions, his decisions, whatever is churning in him that Alexei has had a hand in without knowing and without a chance at repair.

The bigger part, the better, quieter, sadder part, is so glad to see him that it pulls like an old scar. For better or worse, Kent is the lodestone of his life here, the direction of travel. However it ends, Alexei will never claim not to love him.

“You’re too thin,” Alexei says quietly, instead of hello.

“Turns out I’m naturally kind of skinny,” Kent says, shrugging. “Say goodbye to my hockey ass, I know you’ll be sad to see it go.”

“Is okay if I hug you?”

Kent hesitates for a bare second before he nods, and it’s all Alexei can do not to lift him off his feet, wary of causing more pain when all he wants is to assuage the terrible skin hunger itching at him now that Kent is near.

He even clings back, nails digging bright spots into Alexei’s back through the fabric of his shirt.

“I missed you,” Kent says into the side of his neck, warm breath and water-cool skin, words sinking into Alexei like welcome claws. “I’m— fuck. Come in.”

Alexei has to let go of him to do so, but he forces himself somehow, and even manages to pull the door closed behind him.

-

The moment is only a truce, Alexei knows, but it still feels better than nothing, than a Kent-shaped lacuna in his life. Kent is skittish the way only Kent can be, outwardly languid but marble-eyed, smile pasted on as he disappears up the stairs. Even so, Alexei is pleased at how much better he’s moving, tracking the mechanics of his body by rote.

Leo greets Alexei with a firm grip and a serious look, his bright blue eyes intent. “Good to have you,” he says, hand clamped like a vise around Alexei’s forearm. “Need anything?”

It’s so like Leo to ask after his needs right away that Alexei almost loses himself, releasing the reserve he’s been cultivating. This might not last. He might not stay. Nothing is certain and everything is possible. Alexei swallows. “No thank you. You’re well?”

Leo says something soft in confirmation, and Alexei finds himself in the kitchen, leaning up against the counter as Leo prods at a side of fish he’s got laid out in a long bowl, marinating in something dark and aromatic. “You can go upstairs, if you want,” Leo tells him, pointing at the pepper Alexei subsequently hands him. “I’m not chaperoning.”

“I know.”

Leo looks sidelong at him for a second. “Hand me the chilli, would you?” Alexei does. He knows where the spices are, if not what most of them do. It’s strange to realise he’s just on the verge of settling into this rhythm without thinking about it, the muscle memory of Leo’s house embedded in him somehow. He wonders what it would be like to go home and try to do this with his mother, just stand with her in the kitchen and watch her cook. He can’t picture it. He never did it as a child. He’d just walk in and find Nina deep in conversation with her behind the only door in the flat that closed properly.

His father never set foot in there unless it was to find a drink. Suddenly, Alexei feels full to bursting with questions, things he’s never asked Kent, things he wants to know just to compare, just to turn over like stones to see what’s underneath.

It feels like he has so much to lose, but he does it anyway, in case he really does lose it, and this is his last chance. “I’m never doing this with my parents,” he says, watching Leo wrap the fish in foil and slide it gently into the oven. “I’m not sure my father is ever knowing how to cook.” He means to throw a spin of levity on it, but it doesn’t work, English betraying him as it often does with its lack of subtle inflection, meaning both too plain and too direct, undiverted by intonation. “He’s so much better at drinking.”

Leo looks at him strangely, one of those silent, watchful looks Kent has inherited without knowing. “Come on,” Leo says. “It’d be a shame to miss the sun.” He grabs two beers out of the fridge and opens them, leading Alexei to the back garden. It’s neat, mowed and weeded, some lawn chairs and a grill in a sunny corner of the plot. There are no flowers, but though Alexei thinks it might benefit from some, he hasn’t got the faintest idea how to go about growing them.

Leo kicks out a lawn chair for him and hands him a beer, dropping into the other one, patch of sun catching him across his chest. “I don’t know how the hell I raised two kids on my own.” He stares at Alexei for a second and Alexei stares right back, too shocked to say anything. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me, being a father, but there’s no secret to it. I just did my best, and sometimes that hasn’t been— sometimes your best doesn’t measure up. You get used to a lot of failures.” He takes a long pull on his beer, and Alexei tries to think of something to say, to offer, but he’s too tired, too curious, to unused to this kind of brutal honesty. “Kent never talks about Gretchen, does he?”

“Once,” Alexei confesses, tentative, unsure if he’s betraying a confidence.

“That’s more than anyone else, I think,” Leo says, considering. “She drank, you know. Not because— not so anyone would notice, but I knew. I think Adam knew. She never wanted to have kids, but then when she got pregnant… we got married. Her parents were furious.” He laughs a little, shaking his head. “I was so happy, you know? I converted, I got the house ready, the whole thing. She quit for a while, and then after Kent was born she started again.”

He stops talking, and Alexei wonders whether there’s a word for this, the unspoken understanding of a secret. The beer bottle in his hand feels clammy, heating too fast in the sun but still cold against his skin. He puts it down, wiping his hand on the leg of his trousers, taste of it a little bit sour in his mouth. “You’re never think of getting married again?”

“Once was enough for me,” Leo says, “and I don’t think I could even find her to ask for a divorce. This way, I guess— I guess I’ll know if anything happens to her, at least. Sometimes she checks in with her parents, I think, but I’m not their favourite person in the world. Sometimes I wish they’d step up for Kent but…” He sighs heavily, setting his beer aside with a clink on the patio ties. “Look, all I’m saying is there’s not any such thing as a perfect family. There isn’t. You think I don’t wonder every day whether I made a mistake never going after her, and just figuring she’d come back one day? Or that I don’t think of all the times I could have made Kent feel a little better about himself? Hell, he didn’t even tell me about the Zimmermann kid until after you and him— I wish I’d known. I don’t know what I’d have done, but I wish I’d known.” He stops, as though shocked at how much he’s said. “Anyway. No such thing as a life with only good in it.”

Somehow, Alexei wants to thank him, to offer a gift in kind, but there’s nothing ready to come out but a confession. “I’m not a good son,” he says, shading his eyes from the sun falling across his face. “I’m should have helped her leave, but she’s never ask, and I never know how to say. And then she never wants to speak to me again, so now maybe it’s too late, and I’m never know—” He doesn’t finish the thought, still raw and suspended halfway, one foot in the memory. “I’m retired. Maybe I’m not having hockey anymore to not think about it, and I’m seeing how easy can be to start…” the gesture overtakes the thought, and he’s conscious of his hand raised and spread, fingers casting shadows but failing to articulate what he means, how close it cuts to know he’s also abandoned them in some way, how guilty he’s felt about it for all these years without noticing. “I’m the one who’s leaving.”

Leo pats him on the thigh, a hard slap that’s vaguely shocking, habituated as he is to Leo’s careful, warm physicality. “Son, when people reject you for something you can’t change, it’s not your fault,” he says. “Nobody who loves you will blame you for leaving. Trust me on that one.”

Alexei drove up here without expectation, telling himself not to hope for anything impossible, and knowing that mending what’s broken will take more than just time and distance. He’s never conjured anything like this from his subconscious, no blurry shapes marking out home and family and unexpected understanding. It’s almost overwhelming, almost too much to hold inside, but he manages, shocked at himself for not bursting apart at the seams, all the small marks of hard use on his body holding their sutures to the last.

-

Kent joins them on the patio just as the sun is going down. He’s barefoot and hasn’t changed his sweatpants, but he’s wearing a different shirt, faded yellow and bleach-stained. It makes him look even blonder, even more at home in the low-angled sun as he lowers himself carefully into a chair next to Alexei with a big glass of water.

Leo gets up as he arrives, looking at his watch. “Dinner’s probably going to be ready in about twenty minutes,” he says, voice low and even. He passes behind Kent on his way back to the house, ruffling his hair even though Kent swats halfheartedly at his hand.

“I’m a grown-ass man,” Kent mutters, but doesn’t make any further protest. When Leo is gone, Kent sighs, puts his drink down and leans forward into his hands, thighs spreading wide to catch his elbows. “He’s been asking me when I’m going back to Providence since I got here,” he says, muffled by his palms. “I’m sorry for— Sorry.”

“Me too,” Alexei says, remembering the immediate agony of knowing he’d said something irretrievable. “I’m— I called Nina. My sister.”

Kent looks at him, shock plain on his face. “I— did she—”

“It was okay,” Alexei admits, something unravelling in him that’s been coiled tight, waiting to be released. It feels wonderful to tell him, to have Kent near enough to see, to bear witness to Alexei’s relief when he was the one who was there to see the first evidence of severance. “I never think it would be, but she called me back.”

Kent reaches a hand out between them, and Alexei takes it, threading his fingers in with Kent’s, bony knuckles pressing into the soft spaces between his joints.

“I just wanted to tell you,” Alexei says. “Was my first thought, when it’s finished. I’m wishing you were there.”

“Player’s union says you retired,” Kent says, gripping him hard. “I wasn’t— I wasn’t sure you were going to after I took off.”

The thought has never even occurred to him. Alexei tries to pull it into words, the incredulity, the deep certainty he’s had since Kent had his career and his life swept out from under him that hockey was over for them both of them, how little he felt it ever needed to be said. “I don’t want to play without you. I don’t want to keep playing. Maybe end while I’m ahead.”

“Quit while you’re ahead,” Kent corrects, wry twist to his mouth.

“Yes, that.” Alexei looks away from him, finding the sight too distracting, Kent curled against the backrest of the lawn chair, reaching out, his other hand draped across the hollow of his stomach. “I don’t pity you. Can be sad for you without it’s being pity.”

“I know.” Kent’s fingers tighten. Their hands are too warm, and Alexei thinks that they only way he’s going to be able to let go is if someone produces a crowbar. “I’m— I can’t believe how hard it’s been. I thought I’d find a way to get it back somehow, but the— fuck, I’m so scared. I miss you, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m going to do with myself, but it turns out that the only thing that makes it bearable is you. And I know I might have… I know I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

Alexei wants to take the admission and hold it in his hands, gossamer as it is. “When you left is like whole of Providence is not fitting right,” he says quietly. “So maybe we figure it out? Maybe you talk to someone.”

Kent says nothing for a long time, long enough that the sun finally begins to sink below the trees. Alexei thinks maybe it’s long past the twenty minutes Leo warned them of, and doesn’t say a thing about it. It feels like they’ve got a window open between them, finally, a lowering of the glass Alexei has felt growing taller and thicker for months, resistant to his every attempt at cutting it. It feels fragile, but it feels good.

“Can I ask you something?” Alexei says, when Kent nods, a quick jerk in the corner of his vision. “Why you’re never wanting to get married?”

Kent laughs, and Alexei half turns to look at him, wanting to see his face, even if the answer is a bad one.

“I didn’t want to get married because I— I can’t stand the thought that it might not be real to people, or— I… I can’t imagine what it would be like to have it dissolved. I didn’t want you to never be able to— to go home if you wanted, and it just… I always thought maybe you’d change your mind.”

“And you thought maybe it’s easier never speaking to me about this? Never tell me?”

“I don’t like to be scared, okay? I was scared. I didn’t want you to do that thing you do where you say “okay, Kent,” like I’m not being a total asshole about something, but you didn’t— do you even want to?”

The plaintive note in his voice, more than the look in his eyes, more than the death grip Kent has on his hand, is what finally breaks the dam in him, the one thing he’s been holding in for years trickling out in a painful stream. “How you’re asking me that now, after so long? Of course I’m wanting that. Of course I’m wanting— I want to all the time. Let me marry you, maybe we think about having just one house, just one life. How can you not know?” To Alexei, it has always been evident, obvious, the possibility simply one Kent has never allowed to become a reality. “Every time I’m asking you you’re saying I don’t have to, won’t need to. I’m not pushing, thinking maybe it’s just— easy joke.”

Kent flops back against the chair, finally letting go of Alexei’s hand. Alexei mourns the contact, even as he realises how tight he’s been holding, how sore his hand is from it. Kent looks at him, eyes hooded and sad. “I don’t know how you still can, after I—” He breaks off, and Alexei wants to catch him by the wrists and draw his hands away from his hair where he’s buried them, clutching at the messy, stiff waves it always dries into. “Did you want kids?” Kent blurts.

Alexei, blindsided, can’t answer him, force of his longing too much to put directly into words.

“Tell me,” Kent asks, quietly. “Please.”

Alexei swallows back any denials. It’s not the time for careful lies. “Yes. Maybe. But you told me so early, I’m always know is not for you, and I can live without.” Maybe this is the sensation of letting go again, the angry pound of instinct and desire subsiding as he releases it. “Is better. It’s best, because I’m not— not ready for this to be finished.”

“Me either,” Kent says after a while. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come, but I was too scared to ask you to. How fucked up is that?”

“Very,” Alexei says, buoyed just enough to smile. “Can always ask.”

Kent reaches for his hand again, gripping him hard above the wrist. “Pull me up,” he says, voice as choked as Alexei feels. “Please.”

Alexei does, and then he holds him, thinned and warm, as long as Kent will let him. Alexei thinks one of them might be trembling, but he can’t tell which and can’t manage to care. It’s shared, or at least Alexei thinks it might be, a truth in bodies they might never manage in words, even if they’ve finally gotten close.

-

Dinner is a quiet affair. Alexei hasn’t ever gotten the impression that Kent’s family was the kind of casually loud group Alexei remembers his being, but even so there’s often conversation in regular flow between them.

Tonight Leo seems as out of words as Alexei feels. It’s impossible not to watch Kent, to see him in the flesh and not want him on some level, and the room feels pregnant with it, with the sight of him.

Kent and Alexei do the dishes in silence, shoulders bumping, and when they head to bed they exchange no more than a few words between them before Kent invites Alexei into his room.

Alexei curls around him, not quite happy, but still overjoyed to feel him, to be skin-to skin, to know that so many things will need to be said, to be held in the light and examined, but they don’t have to do it now.

The desire he feels isn’t even sexual, at its heart, though his physical reaction to Kent hasn’t changed in the weeks they’ve been apart. It’s a different kind of want, the sort that has its roots in rootlessness, in finding a place to make a home and doing it, growing it piece by piece.

Kent shifts until his forehead is pressed to Alexei’s, hands aimless wanderers over his skin leaving goosebumps where they touch. “Are we okay?” he asks. “Are we going to be?”

“I hope so,” Alexei tells him. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

For once the English comes easily, in exactly the right order. He doesn’t even have to try.

 

EPILOGUE: SUMMER

 

It takes a surprisingly short time to wrap up his life in Providence. Maybe that’s what does it, finally, the little thing that brings his pieces into clashing contact.

When he ends up sitting in the empty living room -- bare of the striped couch Kent has insisted they have room for in Vegas from the hospital -- looking at the river from the wall of windows, he realises it’s taken him days to dismantle what he took years to accumulate. Professional moving service or not, last time he got traded it was last minute, mid-season, impersonal, and he’d just asked someone for a good recommendation and had his whole apartment boxed up and sent to him in Providence.  
This time he’s here for it, watching it happen, fielding his friends and his colleagues away while he does it. The moving service is probably sick to death of him, the way he keeps getting under their feet, watching them touch his things and move his clothes, all but the travelling set he’s got set up to drive with.

This is it. This is the end of his time in Providence, the end of his time long-distance, at the end of a telephone, or an internet connection, or a highway.

He’s sold the place and gives up the keys to the agent tomorrow, and tonight he’s supposed to stay with Eric and Jack, to get a little tipsy in their big yard and pretend he hasn’t noticed the pastel yellow paint that’s sprung up in one of their top-floor guest rooms and all the other little signs of imminent new arrivals.

Alexei thinks he’ll donate the sale of the apartment when the sale closes. He’s been a regular visitor to the children’s hospital for years, and he thinks maybe an anonymous sum is only fair for the amount of time they’ve given him, and the amount of cameras he’s wielded happily for Falcs TV. The thought of it somehow makes the severance better, if not less painful.

He’s been waiting for the signal that it’s time to go for so long that now it’s here it almost doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t seem right that it’s taken a weekend to clear out a decade. He’s almost surprised no skeletons tumble out of his closets, but maybe the benefit of having lived at a distance for so long is that they’ve been in evidence, in full view across the continent for years now, waiting to be acknowledged.

The living room is always filled with light in the evening. It’s one of the reasons he bought the place, after he sold the old one. He lies right down on the floor in a patch of light, feeling flooded with it, remembering all the times he’s thought of it as home. When Kent was here, always. When he invited the rookies over for booze they weren’t legally allowed to buy. When Kit scratched the fuck out of his furniture and Alexei didn’t even care that much.

His back cracks against the floorboards, real wood exposed by the removal of his carpet, rolled up and taken into transit. He’s been sending Kent pictures of it all since he got back from seeing him to the hospital for hopefully the last time, laying out what he’d like to keep, and Kent has been semi-deliriously sending him voice notes in reply: _That’s neat, soft, I like it,_ and _oh my god, I forgot you had a life size cutout of yourself, please, never bring that near me._ He’ll be off the painkillers soon, and Leo will go back to Utica, and Alexei will arrive in time to see him off. It’s planned, and as much as Alexei rails at not being there for Kent’s final stint of post-surgical rehab, if Kent thinks it’s going to be a better fit for Alexei just to come home to him he’s willing to make the sacrifice.

It’s not like it will be quick, the recovery. He might skate again. He might not, but they’ve talked about it. Kent thinks he will, and Alexei will bet all the money he has on Kent managing to make that a reality through sheer stubbornness.

Lately he’s been thinking a lot about possibilities in concrete terms. He’ll never convince Kent that children are something he wants, and Alexei was completely honest in saying he can live without. Maybe they’ll get married. Alexei can picture it, if he tries. On the other hand, is what they have less real without it? Alexei doesn’t think so. It’s more a case of loyalty, of affirmation, of knowing that when he arrives in Las Vegas things in Kent’s house will look a little different, for the presence of Alexei there with him. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with himself now, but he also doesn’t have to decide right away. He’s been working professionally since he was fifteen. Deciding to take some time off, real time off, without press events or benign PR stunts hasn’t lost its appeal at all, so he’s going to do it.

He isn’t going back to Russia anytime soon, but he can almost see the shape of it. He won’t go to Norilsk, but maybe Moscow. It would be a circus. He’d have to be prepared for the worst. But there isn’t yet anything that could officially stop him from going.

It’s early in Norilsk, so he sits up and texts Nina a picture of the view. _Saying goodbye to Providence tomorrow,_ he tells her, not expecting a reply.

 _Send me a picture of Las Vegas_ she sends back. _I want to know if it’s as weird as it looks on TV._

He tells her he will, then gets off the floor, packs the last of his toiletries into a bag and drives over to Jack and Eric’s neighbourhood.

Their house is lit up brightly in the evening, warm orange-yellow glowing from the windows against the particular colour scale of New England, grey and blue and the deep green of summer grass. It’s not the red and brown and clay-orange of the desert, but this also isn’t lost to him forever. It just feels immensely strange to let himself in with his key for the last time, step over the doormat and hear Eric yelling at him that they’re grilling in the back. It doesn’t seem as though it’s an ending, even if he knows it’s the end of a particular chapter of his life.

He opens the patio doors and nearly stumbles back into the house in shock.

“Surprise!”

Alexei is honestly, utterly speechless at how many people have managed to hide their cars on Jack’s street. It looks like the whole team have materialised in the backyard, most of them wearing ridiculous versions of his jersey, or at least his number, in one case hastily painted onto a blue t-shirt in sharpie.

He instantly forgives himself for tearing up.

Later, Eric finds him in the upstairs hall, sitting at the top of the stairs. He sits down next to him, uncharacteristically silent. “Wanna talk about it?” he asks, when Alexei can’t think of anything to say, watching the crowd mill around below. He’s been hugged by so many people tonight that it’s half a blur, warm hands and semi-drunken confessions and hearty slaps on the back. He doesn’t know what to do with his limbs anymore, shocked at how hard it’s hitting him that he’s not going back to this, will never be a part of this team again, and is no longer a hockey player. Now he’s just a guy who plays hockey sometimes, who’ll keep himself sharp, who’s moving across the country because he wants to, but didn’t know how many times he’d need to make that decision.

“I’m not hockey player anymore,” Alexei says, slinging an arm around Eric’s surprisingly solid shoulders.

“I know,” Eric tells him, drawling out the words. “I hope you’ve got a hobby.”

“Maybe I’m learn Swedish next, so can be host for more rookies,” he answers. “We have a Russian for pre-season.” He pauses, thinking about it, wondering what to say that isn’t a betrayal of the mood of the party, warm and jubilant and immediate. “You’re putting this together, yes?”

“Well it wasn’t Jack,” Eric huffs, rolling his eyes gently. “If I invite you to the baby shower will you come?”

“Of course,” Alexei says, genuinely happy for him. “We’ll bring new kittens, so babies will have friends.”

“Kent’s invited too.”

“I know,” Alexei tells him. “Thank you.” He means it.

-

The start of the season arrives in a whirl of changes.

Kent goes back to the Aces and hands over his captaincy, trading it in for a spot higher up. Alexei thinks maybe he’ll turn it down, but it proves to be a good fit despite Kent’s misgivings.

Kent breaks out some champagne for the occasion, and they sit on the couch drinking it from the bottle and watching the first Aces game of the season on Kent’s ridiculous TV.

“I hate this stuff,” Kent says, swallowing heavily. “I don’t know why anyone drinks it.”

Alexei takes the bottle from his hand, caught somewhere just on the edge of happiness. “You’re buying it,” he points out. “More for me if you don’t like it. At home we drink vodka, it’s much better for you.”

Kent falls against his side and makes a grabbing motion, swiping halfheartedly for the bottle Alexei is holding just out of reach. “Come on, we’re gonna score, I want to—” he manages to get the bottle back by throwing a leg over Alexei’s middle, obscuring the sight of the screen.

Alexei relinquishes the bottle, settling both hands on Kent’s waist.

He’s gained back some weight, some of the lean muscle of his thighs beginning to fill out with time and training now that he’s had the last operation. Alexei wonders sometimes what it might be like, to know a part of your body is gone, replaced beneath the skin, that something not muscle and bone is doing its work, but when he asks, Kent just tells him he tries not to think about it.

It’s enough that it doesn’t make Kent flinch to move anymore.

Behind him, the goal horn sounds. Kent pauses with his eyes closed, bottle loose in his fist. “Well, there it is,” he says. “Kiss me before I freak out, would you?”

“Is still time for us to make it to the rink,” Alexei says instead, skating his thumbs under the hem of Kent’s shirt, warmth of his skin a welcome point of contact. “We can go watch, see last period.”

For a long second, he thinks Kent might lose it, stiff in his grip, but then he breathes out, and Alexei draws him down for the asked-for kiss. Kent tastes like Champagne and the gross cinnamon gum he likes, and Alexei wonders all over again how easy it’s been to build themselves a new kind of familiarity, the one where he knows from a breath how close Kent is to being swayed, from the bunch and release of his free hand in Alexei’s hair how eager he is to be distracted.

“Yeah, okay,” Kent mutters, breaking for air, breathing into the shell of Alexei’s ear. “We can give Kozlov a ride home.”

Behind them, the horn sounds again, and Alexei can’t tell if it’s the Aces or the Schooners, and from the way Kent jerks up, he’s madder about it than Alexei is.

“I’ll drive,” Alexei says, putting the bottle out of reach and tipping Kent off his lap.

Kent sprawls over the couch with an indignant huff, displacing Kit from where she’s been obliviously napping on the armrest. She yowls and flees the room, and Kent throws an arm over his eyes, laughing quietly up at the ceiling. “First game of the season,” Kent says, “and we’re on the couch.”

Alexei should ask how Kent feels, probably, but he really doesn’t need to. He’s feeling it himself in some smaller measure, the strange pull of something forgotten, like they should be somewhere they aren’t, a faint, grasping reminder at the back of his mind. It hurts but it doesn’t; it’s a phantom, not quite a thing of the past but something that other people do, now, something other people play, something they used to be a different part of.

Kent has taken surprisingly well to management, though Alexei will never tell him he thinks so. It’s not exactly the most flattering thing he could ever confess to, that the idea of Kent in an office had seemed strange until it wasn’t.

“Whose idea was it to be staying home for first game?” Alexei asks, waving off the TV.

“Mine,” Kent says, getting up with his usual care, testing the weight before he commits to standing. “Don’t rub it in.”

“I’m not rub anything,” Alexei says, fishing around in the bowl by the door he’s finally insisted on so that keys are always where they should be. “What I said when you said you’re staying home, not getting all excited from up in the box?”

“Nothing,” Kent admits, grabbing a hat from the floor and making sure it’s one of his before he puts it on. “Come on, before I chicken out.”

“Can if you want to,” Alexei says.

Kent stops and looks at him, hair held back off his face and cheeks finally filled-in again, still pale and freckled and deceptively delicate, and Alexei reflects that age is beginning to sit well on him, the little lines by his eyes well-earned, even if they’re mostly not from smiling.

“Nah, let’s go. I want to see it.” Kent presses up on his toes, casual, as though it isn’t a wonderful bit of new progress, and nips at Alexei’s jaw, leaving his right hand on his shoulder for balance. “You know the weirdest thing? I miss the smell. You know? That fucking locker room smell. And then just— the ice, I guess. I miss it all.”

“Me too,” Alexei admits, letting it out, the honest rush of longing he still gets sometimes, when he stops by the Aces practice, when he sees their nervous rookie houseguest leaving in the morning, all of eighteen and still a little overawed by where he is and whose shoes he sees every day.

He’s been sitting in with the coaches since camp, mostly by invitation, and it’s not the same, but it’s something. It’s less important than realising day by day that they’ve somehow landed where Alexei always hoped they would. Over Kent’s shoulder, the house looks slightly different. Alexei can spot traces of himself here now, can see the evidence of room made and things shared in a tangible, tactile sort of way, and it feels— it feels good, solid, real.

Not everything has to be fixed right away, maybe. It’s possible that the possibility is enough, when they’re both reaching for the same thing. Alexei thinks getting a therapist might have been the best decision he’s made lately, seeing how good it’s been for Kent.

Kent still has his hand on Alexei’s shoulder, is still close enough to radiate warmth. “You’re tell me if it’s not okay, right?” Alexei asks.

“Only if you will,” Kent replies, taking the keys out of Alexei’s hand. “Let’s go.”

It’s a start, Alexei thinks. They’ve had almost seven years of beginnings, of first times, of waiting for each other to be ready for something else. This isn’t the way he’d ever have wanted to get here, but here they are anyway, both of them.

There’s so much he still wants. He wants to see if Kent will reconsider the possibility of vows, even if it’s real to nobody but them. He wants to find a way to live that isn’t solitary, to discover Las Vegas, to take Kent somewhere where nobody knows who they are for a week or five. He wants to call his sister on Saturdays like he’s been doing lately and speak to his nieces. Maybe if they want to come and visit he’d like to have them over. He wants to talk to Kent about it. He will.

Most of all, he wants a place to stay for a while, but he’s beginning to realise that place is subjective in him somehow, something earned and carried within.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”

-

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again! I still don't know how hockey works, but I do know that it's vitally important to get deep, to get into the crease and push hard, get bodies pounding and to be quick on the stick. 
> 
> So, uh, have a 45k meditation on loneliness and expatriation. I've lived in six countries, it's been great and it hasn't sometimes. Consider this a non-essential sequel to a very different fic, and for those of you who have found interest in it, thank you very, very much. 
> 
> I am going back to sleep because I am a feral ball of sweaters disguised as a grad student and not a human person with feelings. When is summer coming back? 
> 
> Answers on a postcard, or just on tumblr [here.](http://febricant.tumblr.com)


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